The president of the German soccer club where a pioneering female coach will take charge of her first top-division men’s game Saturday has ruled out giving her the job on a permanent basis. He says he’s acting out of respect for women’s soccer.
Marie-Louise Eta is coaching Union Berlin against Wolfsburg on Saturday as she starts a five-game stint as the team’s interim coach in the Bundesliga until the end of the season. That will make her the first female coach in any of Europe’s five biggest national men’s leagues.
However, Eta previously signed a contract to coach Union’s women’s team from next season and club president Dirk Zingler wants to stick to that plan. Viewing her interim role as a five-game audition for the men’s job is a “disservice” to the women’s game, Zingler said.
“If (Eta) is really good, then she stays with the men, and if she’s not so good, she goes to the women, that’s not a discussion I’m having at all,” Zingler told Sky Sport Germany late Thursday.
“It’s always a specialist, fact-based decision about who coaches which team and if we associate her with this discussion, then we’re doing a disservice to her and to women’s soccer as a whole. Marie-Louise Eta will be responsible for five games here and then she will take over the women.”
Zingler seems to be overruling Horst Heldt, Union’s director of men’s professional soccer, who had said he wouldn’t rule Eta out as a candidate for the permanent men’s team role.
Eta herself has said she’s focusing on the team’s performance on the field and suggested she isn’t looking beyond that.
“Next year in any case I’ll still be a coach,” she said Thursday.
Eta previously made history as the first female assistant coach in the men’s Bundesliga and has been coaching the under-19 men’s team at Union.
With five games to go, Union is 11th in the 18-team Bundesliga and not yet mathematically safe from the threat of relegation. Eta’s predecessor Steffen Baumgart was fired last week with the team having won none of its last three games, and only two of the last 14.
The announcement of the 34-year-old Eta’s appointment prompted sexist and derogatory comments on social media, leading Union to push back.
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