Filzmaier analyzes – Kick it like Beckham

1. Sports would be a man’s thing. That was the bad prejudice. But the first women’s team – the British Ladies – was founded in 1894 by Nettie Honeyball. By the way, his England North vs England South premiere match on March 23, 1895 ended 7:1. For more than 10,000 spectators! England as the motherland of football, so that had a double meaning.

2. In Austria, after an interlude in 1923 that was considered more popular entertainment, organized women’s football took place as early as the 1930s. Only the National Socialists stopped this because it contradicted their ideology and their image of women. The ensuing problem was that in German-speaking countries, after the end of the Nazi regime of terror, people continued to discriminate against women in football.

3. For decades after 1945 there was no equality. We in Austria have only had a national championship since 1972. The Austrian Football Association (ÖFB) only took charge of this women’s league in 1982 and from then on called it the Bundesliga with two levels of play. The national competition for women has been played with ten teams since 2010.

4. What has happened so far? The word emancipation comes from Latin and means liberation from a state of dependence to independence. It looked like this: In Germany, the Football Association banned women’s football from 1955 to 1970 for “aesthetic reasons and fundamental considerations”.

5. For us, the ÖFB was no better. In 1957, the clubs were banned from having their own women’s sections. When the USC Landhaus Wien team was founded more than ten years later for women, it could initially only play friendly matches against foreign teams, especially from Czechoslovakia.

6. At the tables of the regulars as well as male football officials and journalists, there have always been some disgusting reasons why women shouldn’t kick the ball. There were absurd effects on sex organs and fertility. Stupidly, they seamlessly followed the Nazi ideas of women who, of all things, shouldn’t have wide hands—or thick necks, and so on—as viragos when it comes to football.

7. Drooling men babbled about “spreading and spreading movements and athletic poses” as “weakening of feminine modesty and diminished love of quiet housework.” There are even indications of stones being thrown at women who train with the ball.

8. Is all that a thing of the past now? Oh well. Fortunately, the current European Championship is viewed very positively. But let’s take a money comparison as a benchmark: Mr Cristiano Ronaldo earned over 100 million euros including advertising contracts last season. Although he did not win a football title at all. The highest earning women – Trinity Rodham and Megan Rapinoe in the US – earn less than $300,000.

9. A nice amount, but more than three hundred times less. In the national team, the American women had to file a lawsuit for equal pay in court. Before the trial, the male-dominated American Football Association went limp and guaranteed not only equal pay, but also gender-independent bonus payments, a share of the prize money, a share of ticket sales, and so on.

10. Despite improvements, this is still not the case in Austria. In addition, the fish does not only start to stink at the head. Discrimination against women in football starts with trivial matters such as training fields and times. The female gender should be in the background.