International   

Women on the ball

How they have staked their claim at the World Cup

Hanover: Women are everywhere at this World Cup. They crowd stadiums and street festivals, rearrange their lives around game schedules. Germany's woman Chancellor is leading the cheers from the VIP section.

It is a long way from the days when soccer was strictly men's business, when female spectators were an oddity. DFB, the German soccer federation, only lifted a ban on women in the sport in 1970. Three years later, the nation's first woman TV sports anchor was booed off the stage by predominantly male viewers for getting the name of a Bundesliga team wrong.

The decades-long exclusion of woman fans and players bred a backslapping, violence-prone male soccer culture that put off even more women, said psychologist Ursula Kessels of the Freie Universitaet Berlin. But once the dam was breached, the women came to the sport in huge numbers. Germany's national women's team is No 1 in the world, ahead of the U.S. The Germans won the 2003 World Cup and are six-time European champions. A women's Bundesliga was formed in 1991. Today, 12 per cent of the 6.3 million members in Germany's soccer clubs are women. Soccer has become the No. 1 team sport for girls. One of the young players, 15-year-old Johanna Friebel, helped start her own team with three close friends in the central German village of Schlangen. She attends all home games of FC Paderborn, a second division club.

"More and more girls are coming to watch the Paderborn games," she said. With three girlfriends, she follows Germany's World Cup games on a large screen in Paderborn, and the other matches at home on TV.

A spokesman for DFB hopes the World Cup, with its good-natured street celebrations, will attract even more women. One high-profile fan is normally subdued Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has attended every Germany game and has been captured in TV close-up shots raising her arms in joy over a goal.

Yet in an interview earlier this year with Germany's largest tabloid, she had to prove her soccer credentials. Asked by Bildzeitung if she knew the offside rules, she said she had expected such a question, then drew some diagrams for the journalists, passing the test. "You probably wouldn't have asked a male Chancellor this question," she admonished the journalists. "I'm also sure many don't know the answer." A TV commentator wondered out loud about the absence of Ms. Merkel's husband, who stays out of the limelight and, according to the Chancellor, does not care much about soccer. — AP

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

`Plot' to blow up Sears Tower
LTTE demand regrettable, says Solheim
Kabul wants closer relations with Pakistan: Minister
Barbara Epstein, 1928-2006
Women on the ball
Chinese team at U.S. war games
Somalis sign peace pact
India-Singapore land route proposed to cut bandwidth cost, says Dayanidhi Maran

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu