WOMEN WORLD CUP 2011: Germany Hoping for Another Summer Fairytale

Women's Soccer World Cup

Germany Hoping for Another Summer Fairytale

Germany is all set to host the 2011 Women's World Cup later this month. Fans are hoping for a "summer fairytale" to rival that enjoyed during the men's tournament in 2006, and many in women's soccer are hoping the sport will enjoy a global boom. Most players, however, just want things to get a little better.

It is a spring Sunday in Hamburg and a football match is underway in a stadium on Hagenbeckstrasse. A line of fans snakes away from the sole ticket booth and the food stand is doing a brisk trade in packets of muesli "hand-signed" by the home team, Hamburger SV, or HSV. Hamburg's coach is ranting on the sidelines, accusing the referees of colluding with the other team's manager, claiming they spoke before kickoff. Meanwhile, the woman guarding Hamburg's goal is urging a teammate, "Don't just stand there, Meike, come on!"

The game is HSV versus 1. FFC Frankfurt, both teams members of Germany's Frauen-Bundesliga, or women's national league. The setting could just as easily be that of a men's game in a regional league, but that's an unwelcome observation here. These players reject comparisons with men's soccer. After all, they say, no one would measure a female sprinter against a man's time in the 100-meter dash.

The next Sunday, a game takes place at the Karl Liebknecht Stadium in Babelsberg, just outside of Berlin. There are 6,000 spectators inside the stadium and another 1,000 still pushing their way in. The German president and the governor of the state of Brandenburg are both in attendance and the fans are chanting and singing their club's song. Still, it's occasionally still possible to hear the players from up in the stands. "We need a guy over there," Potsdam's co-coach calls out. Babett Peter, playing sweeper, warns a teammate, "Man on!" And when she assigns another teammate to a specific opposing player, it's "Your man."

The Language of Men's Soccer

It is the language of men's football. The women and girls who play, now believed to number over a million in Germany and around 30 million across the globe, have adopted the rituals of their male counterparts -- the songs, the high-fives, the post-game celebrations in which they spray one another with champagne as confetti rains down. After the cup final in Cologne, Rolf Töpperwien, a men's football commentator, acted as an emcee for the winners from Frankfurt and made a very male joke when he mentioned the bank that sponsored the team's "chests," referring to their shirts.

Female football players want to be seen as independent and not comparable to their male counterparts, but they're also still looking for their own identity, their own profile. This summer, though, is the moment when women's football is expected to make it big. The German Football Association (DFB) has declared this "the year of the woman" and urged all fans to come together to make the upcoming Women's World Cup "a collaboration." When Germany organizes an international football tournament, it doesn't do half measures.

Doris Fitschen, manager of the German women's national team, believes this World Cup should help bring about at least semi-professional status for all players in the women's national league, as well as an increase in viewers, respect and professionalism in the sport. It has certainly never had a higher public profile -- all 32 World Cup games will be shown live on either ARD or ZDF, German public broadcasters.

The future of soccer is female, FIFA president Sepp Blatter declared in 1995, and it seems this future may finally be starting. Everyone is looking to Germany as the land of women's football, the country that has won the Women's World Cup twice and boasts the globe's strongest league. If a World Cup here doesn't achieve the "quantum leap" functionaries in the sport are talking about, nothing will. That's how they see it, at least.

Following in the Kaiser's Footsteps

Steffi Jones is the world's biggest advocate of women's football. There could scarcely be a better candidate to explain how to build up a successful national team than the woman who played for Germany 111 times, including at the 1999 and 2003 World Cups, and was national champion six times in Germany, as well as once in the United States with the Washington Freedom.

Jones, 38, was known as the "Kaiserin", or "Empress", during her playing days, because she marshaled her defense like football legend Franz Beckenbauer -- famously nicknamed the "Kaiser." Now Jones is stepping into a Beckenbauer-type role once again, serving as president of the organizing committee for the 2011 Women's World Cup and traveling to all the participating countries, just as Beckenbauer did when he fulfilled the same role for the men's World Cup in Germany in 2006. Jones is an ideal representative for women's soccer, not least because of her ability to inspire -- and because of her own history.

Jones says she wants to increase her sport's popularity around the world and to open doors in countries where women's rights are something of an unknown concept. She doesn't see herself as a "front woman," she says, and she's not a women's libber. She's simply speaking from experience.

Lacking the Structures to Support Young Players

On a recent stop in Brazil, part of her global tour, Jones was gazing out at the ocean and cliffs shrouded in fog from her fifth floor Rio de Janeiro hotel room. She was there in part to meet with Joana Havelange, one of the organizers of the 2014 men's World Cup in Brazil. Havelange was looking for a few tips.

Brazil is a football country, but not a women's football country. The women were runners up at the last World Cup in 2007, fielding the world's best and most popular female player, Marta. But the association doesn't have a functioning league -- nor even a national championship -- and the best players go abroad. Brazil also lacks the necessary structures to support young players, precisely Jones' area of interest.

She heads to São Januário Stadium in the Vasco da Gama district of the city. The local club is the only one of Rio's four large clubs to also maintain a professional women's division. Jones stands in the middle of the field, where several girls' teams have lined up, and holds a speech in the rain. "You are all ambassadors of women's soccer," she says through an interpreter. The girls beam. Roberto Dinamite, former national player and now club president of CR Vasco da Gama, hands Jones a jersey, which she pulls on immediately. The president stares at her tattoos.

Girls Disappearing from Soccer

Her next appointment takes Jones to a football school run by Zico. A former star on the pitch, he works with around 400 promising young players on the outskirts of Rio. He relates that he had 70 girls here, but when they reached 16 or 17, they abandoned the sport, because there were no teams for them, no league. Steffi Jones looks discomfited at the news, but there's nothing she can do about it at the moment.

She herself was miserable when she was no longer allowed to play with the boys. DFB regulations stipulate the separation of boys and girls at age 13, which meant Jones had to switch to a girls' team in Praunheim, a different district of Frankfurt. As a child, she believed she had to be a boy to be allowed to play soccer and begged her mother to cut her hair short, "or I'll kill myself."

Steffi Jones' book about her career and her life, "Der Kick des Lebens" ("The Kick of Life"), published in 2007, served as a sort of therapy for herself and her mother. The alternative to writing, Jones says, would have been a visit to a psychologist.

The book describes a childhood in Bonames, a disadvantaged neighborhood in Frankfurt. Jones' father, an African-American US soldier, left the family when she was four, and her life was marked by racism and financial difficulties. Her older brother became addicted to drugs, ending up in a home and later in prison for theft. Her younger brother, a professional soldier with the US Army, lost both legs in the Iraq War. Steffi Jones believes she was "born on the shady side" of life. Football has been her stabilizing force since childhood, when others called her names like "little n****r" and "curly head."

Paying Female Players a Living

Still, the game didn't provide a living. Up until the point she moved to the American league, Jones had to earn money elsewhere, for example as a supermarket manager, and her clubs sometimes didn't fulfill the terms of their contracts. She once resigned from the national team over absences her employer had complained about -- she needed the income.

Now, Jones has formulated a plausible goal for her time as a FIFA functionary: for all female national league players to be able to live off the sport. After the World Cup, Jones will become director of women's football at the DFB. Her mother, who once wanted to forbid her daughter from playing the sport, is "very proud," Jones says.

The spring evening in Rio belongs to the Germans, as they present their Women's World Cup to 150 invited guests in the century-old Villa Riso. The logo for the tournament looks like a queen bee standing upright. In one video clip, German star Martina Müller calls Wolfsburg, one of the host cities for the Women's World Cup, "a city full of dynamism." A brochure offers a description of another host city: "Leverkusen's most important sight is the water tower."

Loss of Feminine Grace

Of course, this self-fulfilling boom also has to do with creating new markets for the sport. Player numbers have been stagnating in Germany, with only the number of women and girls still on the rise. Women's soccer is the fastest growing team sport, according to DFB President Theo Zwanziger.

Until 1970, the DFB forbade its clubs to establish women's divisions. Soccer, it was thought, meant the loss of feminine grace. When an unofficial World Cup took place in 1981, Germany sent the team SSG Bergisch Gladbach to Taiwan, since it lacked a national team. In 1989, a win at the European Championships earned the team a coffee set from Villeroy & Boch. Now, a World Cup win would see each player receive €60,000 ($86,800).

Siegfried Dietrich, 53, manages 1. FFC Frankfurt, the club considered the women's football equivalent of perennial men's powerhouse Bayern Munich. The club has signed Germany star Lira Bajramaj of Turbine Potsdam for next season, as well as Kim Kulig of HSV. Dietrich considers them "leaders of the new generation." He has also been Kulig's personal manager since 2009, a double role surely tolerated only because of his unusual position: Dietrich is essentially Mr. Women's Football.

A New Career

Dietrich was once a massage therapist for the national figure skating team, and describes how he met Katarina Witt and put together an ice skating gala for her. He then opened an agency alongside his massage therapy practice, launching a new career.

In the early 1990s, someone in Frankfurt introduced Dietrich to women's football. He put the club in contact first with a partner for stadium advertisements then with a jersey sponsor. Eventually, he obtained marketing rights to the club and has since guaranteed it a yearly advertising payment in exchange. It was a risky investment. Dietrich adds: "I knew this sport could go on a downward spiral -- because that's football."

Dietrich isn't shy about praising his nose for talent. He had Nia Künzer signed long before she attained fame for her golden goal which won the World Cup for Germany in 2003. He also provided Steffi Jones with advertising revenue. He establishes personalities, Dietrich says, and around 15 female players in his club now make their living from the sport. "We give them security," he says. "The World Cup will be the starting shot into a new dimension."

At the moment, the women's league remains a business reliant on subsidies. The DFB pays each national league team €180,000 per year. That brings Turbine Potsdam, recently German champions three times in a row, to a budget of €1.5 million. The club also benefits from a neighboring elite sport school, which supplies it with young talent.

Women's Football has "Reached its Limits"

Bernd Schröder has been the trainer of Turbine Potsdam for four decades, minus a brief interruption. His office is on the grounds of the sport school. Once again, his team has reached the Champions League final. Turbine Potsdam began as part of a sports group supported by a publicly owned East German utility company. Schröder has supervised the team on a volunteer basis since 1971. He refers to players' agents as "hypocrites" and views with suspicion anyone who wants to make money from the amateur sport of women's soccer. "Women's football has reached its limits," he says. "There won't be a sustainable boom." Why would more than 1,000 spectators, on average, come to a game, he asks, and "why would a man identify with women's football?"

Schröder studied mining science and says he doesn't really hold with "subjunctives." He's clearly the spoilsport in this World Cup year, and he offers his views to visitors from his spot behind his desk, between stacks of yellowed newspapers.

Many of his players are semi-professionals, working other jobs by the hour or participating in sport promotion groups run by the German military, the Bundeswehr. Schröder says he could have had Bajramaj too, but he "wasn't interested in horse trading." Besides, he says, the hype surrounding her is damaging. "Overly promoting her like this won't make her better."

Unter den Linden, Berlin's famous boulevard, hosted a reception a couple months ago for ambassadors from the countries participating in the Women's World Cup. On the menu were meatballs and fig mustard. Steffi Jones, president of the organizing committee, declared: "We're going to see good games and have good weather."

Jones has a marionette hanging in her Frankfurt office -- Jim Knopf, a character known both from a German children's story by Michael Ende and an adaptation of the same story at the famous puppet theater in Augsburg. The character fits her, Jones says: an orphaned child with dark skin, who arrived in the fantasy kingdom of Morrowland one day by mail.

Augsburg, in fact, is one of the World Cup's nine venues, and its puppet theater has created a play specifically for Jones. The title, "Steffi - ein Sommermärchen" ("Steffi - A Summer Fairytale"), references the "fairy tale" summer of 2006, when Germany hosted the Men's World Cup.

And Jones no longer has to be a boy.