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BFV - How to cipher clichés - Sports
In the Bavarian Football Association, women players, officials and politicians discuss gender roles on the occasion of the World Cup.
"You do not look like you're playing football." Valentina Maceri often used to hear this phrase. Born in Nuremberg as a child emulated her cousins on the football field, moved with 18 years to the club Bardolino Verona in the Italian Serie A. Her parents were initially against the fact that the daughter opted for such a typical male sport. Girls should not play football, it was said back then, you get crooked legs.
After a year in the first Italian league, the 26-year-old decided to end his footballing career and become a sports presenter instead. On Monday, she led a panel discussion on gender stereotyping in sports at the club house of FT Gern, more precisely: in football.
Invited was the Association Women and Girls Committee (VFMA) in the Bavarian Football Association, on the occasion of the World Cup in France. The VFMA supports clubs that want to build women's teams with training material and leads girls to the club football with the project "Ballbina kickt". And that still means overcoming stereotypes.
Sandra Hofmann, chairman of the committee, initially had less to fight against such prejudices. Growing up in what she calls a "football crazy family", she spent a lot of time on the football field as a child. When she began volunteering for the association in 2011, she was astonished: only men were sitting in the committees. Before assuming the chairmanship of the VFMA in the spring of this year, Hofmann had been running the men's district leagues in Middle Franconia for two years - the first woman in Bavaria. "You notice how men's expressions change when a woman sits at the table," says the 36-year-old about the work in the association.
The Bavarian Minister of State for Family, Labor and Social Affairs, Kerstin Schreyer (CSU), has had similar experiences in politics. For women - be they ministers or trainers - is also much more often questioned: Can she even? In general, the attitude of society must change, says Schreyer: "We have to understand that it is not an exclusion to do sports and to be a woman."
In any case, girls often start playing in mixed children's teams. For footballer Nina Windmüller, girls' teams were originally never an issue. The 31-year-old, who climbed into the Bundesliga last season with 1. FC Köln, played as a child always with guys, her role model: David Beckham. Only in the D-Youth, she was forced to join a girls' team. "That was a huge drama when I had to leave my buddies," she says. In addition to her contract with 1. FC Köln Windmüller earned her money as a freestyle football artist. In the women's Bundesliga such a double burden is nothing unusual, many players work or study incidentally. The exception: Players of Champions League clubs like FC Bayern or VfL Wolfsburg can devote themselves to full-time football. "If you demand professionalism, you also have to create professional conditions," says Windmüller.
Regarding equality between men's and women's football, Minister Schreyer sees some catching up. While the football World Federation Fifa at the World Cup women's premiums of around 27 million euros paid, went to the men's World Cup 34 million euros alone to the winner. And from an arrangement like the Norwegian Federation, which provides the same budget for the national teams of women as for the men, Germany is far away. Nevertheless, a lot has happened. In the meantime there are isolated trainers in the regional and top leagues of the men. "A few years ago that would have been unthinkable," says Hofmann.