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.

GERMANY 2011: more good news for the Canadian women's soccer team.

The Canadian Soccer Association announced Friday that it has reached a compensation agreement with members of the team for 2011 and 2012.

Friday's announcement resolves the pay dispute between the CSA, the sport's governing body in Canada, and the Canadian team ahead of this summer's FIFA Women's World Cup. Canada begins play at the World Cup against Germany in Berlin on June 26.

"We're happy that the issue has been resolved before the World Cup," Canadian defender Emily Zurrer told CBCSports.ca.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

"The Canadian Soccer Association is pleased that we have reached a resolution and we look forward to supporting the women's national team at the FIFA Women's World Cup, as well as the 2012 CONCACAF Women's Olympic qualification tournament in Vancouver and the London 2012 Olympic Games," CSA general secretary Peter Montopoli said in a media release.

The 25 members of the women's team had retained legal counsel and threatened to file a suit for binding arbitration with the Sport Dispute Resolution Centre of Canada.

The women contended that the Canadian men's team had a fixed-term arrangement with the CSA under which they were paid on a per-game basis. The women said they wanted a similar deal, instead of receiving what they called ad-hoc payments from the CSA.

The announcement of the payment deal comes a day after the CSA revealed it reached an agreement with Carolina Morace, retaining the coach's services through the 2012 London Olympics.

Morace, a 47-year-old native of Venice, Italy, threatened to quit her post following the upcoming FIFA Women's World Cup over her growing frustrations with the CSA.

"We would like to thank James Bunting and his associate, Maureen Armstrong from the law firm Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg in Toronto, for working with our team pro bono and their continued hard work and support. They are an amazing group of individuals and we can't even begin to thank them enough," Canadian midfielder Kaylyn Kyle

World Soccer: Iranian women’s team forfeits 2012 qualifier over head scarves

The Iranian women's soccer team was in tears after being forced to forfeit a 2012 London Olympics qualifying match this past weekend because it showed up to play in hijabs. FIFA banned the Islamic head scarf in 2007, saying that it could cause choking injuries -- the same reason it gave for recently banning snoods (neck warmers). FIFA also has strict rules against any religious statements in team uniforms.
Since Iran refused to comply with these rules and didn't use the specially designed caps that its 2010 Youth Olympics team wore, Friday's match was abandoned by officials and a 3-0 win was awarded to Jordan as a result. The Football Federation of Iran said it will complain to FIFA about the ruling, but FIFA says assurances were made beforehand so that this situation would've been avoided.
"Despite initial assurances that the Iranian delegation understood this, the players came out wearing the hijab, and the head and neck totally covered, which was an infringement of the laws of the game," FIFA said in a statement. [...]
Jordan team officials also objected to the hijab rule before the game, but prepared to play by declining to select women who objected on religious grounds.
"The Iranian team and three Jordanian players were also banned from playing because they wore the traditional head cover," Rana Husseini, head of Jordan's women's football committee, told The Associated Press.
"The problem is that the head cover assigned and approved by FIFA for women players to wear does not suit them as it reveals part of the neck and this is not allowed and it is not acceptable," she said.
Iran also forfeited a second group match against Vietnam on Sunday, seriously damaging its chances of advancing to the London Olympics. It seems unlikely that its federation's complaints will help its case, though, since these rules are not new and compromises have been made in the past. It's just a shame these women were put in the middle of this debate between Iran's federation and FIFA and set up for disappointment.

Iran's women's soccer team may be sitting out the 2010 Youth Olympics in Singapore next month because of a dispute over their Islamic uniforms. The young athletes, all under 15, are at the center of a struggle over how to follow Iran's dress code and still compete in the international arena.

Last week the government unveiled the team's new outfits, a modest ensemble of pants, long sleeves, and high knee socks, with a cap that covers their hair. The outfits are designed in red, white and green to match the Iranian flag.

The top female official of Iran's physical education department was apparently offended by the uniforms, saying they were "inappropriate" and that the team would not compete in them. The uniforms had been a compromise; in 2007 FIFA, the organizing body of world soccer, had banned the old uniform because it included the hejab, or Islamic head scarf. The hejab violated FIFA safety regulations and a rule barring religious or political symbols on the field, Reuters reports.

Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iranian women have been required to cover their heads and bodies in public. Fatima Adbollahian, an Iranian filmmaker who made a documentary about the country's female athletes, says women were kept out of athletic competition in the 1980s. As the playing field opened up to women in the 1990s, they joined sports that could accommodate the hejab, like archery and martial arts.

Within those limits, they excelled; in 2008 ABC News profiled Iran's first woman to earn a spot in the Olympics, Taekwondo champion Sara Khoshjamal.

"If there's one thing I love to do...it's sport," said Sonya Shahamati of the Iranian Baseball League. Baseball is a relatively new arrival in the Islamic Republic, and women have taken to running bases in baggy shirts and head scarves.

"On one hand, maybe it's difficult," she told ABC News in 2007, wearing a hejab under her baseball cap. "But in Iran we have to, and we don't have any problem."

But even in the sports they can play in public, Abdollahian, the filmmaker, says that women athletes face stiff challenges.

Iran's Women Athletes Fight for Equality

"They have to still fight for equality -- funding, infrastructure for them is not the same as for male athletes. And of course they also have to deal with certain social tension," she told ABC News.

"The classic role of women in Iran is still the wife, the daughter, the mother. To be a professional athlete in Iran means to pay a much higher price…that takes a lot more energy than it does for male professional athletes."

Still, she says, the past ten years have given women much more opportunity in sports. As for the controversy over women's soccer uniforms, she attributes it to a conservative government growing increasingly strict about Islamic dress.

"Sports have become a very, very important tool of [women's] self-expression…getting rid of extra energy they might not be able to lose or express when they are only bound to work and the private household," she said.

"This is something the government would not be allowed to take from them anymore. It's amazing…it's irreversible."

Iran president says headscarf ban in soccer imposed by 'dictators' FIFA

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described FIFA as "colonialists" on Tuesday for a headscarf ban in football that affect its women's team.
Mustafa Musleh Zadeh, Iran's ambassador to Jordan, went further by saying the ban was "inhumane" and "politically motivated."
The remarks by Ahmadinejad were the highest since the team forfeited a 2012 Olympic qualifier against Jordan last Friday because it wouldn't play without the hijabs.
"These are the dictators and colonialists who want to impose their lifestyle on others," Ahmadinejad said in a seasonal news conference.
The Iran president said he'd assigned Ali Saeedlu, the head of Iran's physical education, to pursue the case.
"We will deal with those who carried out this ugly job," said Ahmadinejad. "We follow definite rights of our girls."
Zadeh said Iran would complain to the Asian Football Federation.
FIFA said the ban on the Islamic scarf covering a women's neck was for safety reasons.
The ambassador called FIFA's ban "extremism," similar to Afghanistan's Taliban restrictions on women in sports.
FIFA banned the hijab in 2007 and has extended the safety rule to include neck warmers.
At the 2010 Youth Olympics, Iran's girls protected their modesty by covering their hair with specially designed caps.

FIFA rejects complaint over Islamic scarf ban

GENEVA - Iran's women's team was correctly prevented from playing a 2012 Olympics qualifier wearing Islamic head scarves, FIFA said Monday.

Iranian officials were "informed thoroughly" before Friday's match against Jordan that the hijab scarf is banned for safety reasons, soccer's governing body said.

"Despite initial assurances that the Iranian delegation understood this, the players came out wearing the hijab, and the head and neck totally covered, which was an infringement of the laws of the game," FIFA said in a statement.

FIFA banned the hijab in 2007 and this year extended the safety rule to include neck warmers, which were also judged a threat to cause a choking injury. Soccer's rules also prohibit religious statements in team uniforms.

Iran's soccer association has said it will complain about the FIFA delegate from Bahrain who ordered the match abandoned, and the decision to award Jordan a 3-0 victory.

"I will file a complaint to FIFA against the individual in charge of holding the match," Ali Kaffashian, the Iranian Football Federation president, said Saturday in comments reported by the Fars news agency.

Jordan team officials also objected to the hijab rule before the game, but prepared to play by declining to select women who objected on religious grounds.

"The Iranian team and three Jordanian players were also banned from playing because they wore the traditional head cover," Rana Husseini, head of Jordan's women's soccer committee, told The Associated Press.

"The problem is that the head cover assigned and approved by FIFA for women players to wear does not suit them as it reveals part of the neck and this is not allowed and it is not acceptable," she said.

FIFA addressed the problem at the 2010 Youth Olympics when Iran's girls protected their modesty by covering their hair with specially designed caps.

Husseini said Jordan's Prince Ali, who joined FIFA's executive committee last week, would seek talks to resolve the issue.

Iran also forfeited its match against Vietnam on Sunday as part of a round-robin group playing in Amman, Jordan, which also includes Thailand and Uzbekistan.

The winner enters a final group with Asia's five highest-ranked teams to decide which two countries advance to the London Games

British PM says FIFA at ‘all-time low’

LONDON - British Prime Minister David Cameron says FIFA's reputation is at an "all-time low" and needs to be more accountable as it tackles the worst crisis in its 107-year history.
Cameron told the House of Commons on Wednesday that it was "something of a farce" that Sepp Blatter was re-elected as president unopposed last week.
Blatter's only challenger, Mohamed bin Hammam, was suspended three days before the election along with fellow FIFA executive committee member Jack Warner on campaign bribery charges.
Cameron says "FIFA's reputation is now at an all-time low and obviously the election with just one candidate was something of a farce."
Cameron wants world football's governing body to "become more transparent and more accountable."