DW: Ms. Voss-Tecklenburg, it could be that the women’s soccer World Cup, which takes place in Australia and New Zealand in July, will not be broadcast on television in countries like Germany and England. Do you think that’s possible?
Martina Voss-Tecklenburg: For me there is no alternative that an agreement has to be reached. So far there is no solution in five European countries. Women’s football is particularly strong in Europe. So I can only appeal to common sense and to all parties involved to find a way to come to an agreement. It’s about so much: the value of a tournament, visibility, millions of fans. It’s also about the older generation who would like to watch the games. If the World Cup is only shown in the stream, the younger ones can still handle it, but my parents wouldn’t be able to watch the World Cup. They are 86 and 82 years old. But it is also about the people who work in the TV area, who have to plan and need certainty about what will happen in the next few weeks. Therefore my appeal again: Find a common way!
Women’s football has fought for more visibility for many years. How bad would the damage be if the tournament were literally invisible in Germany, for example?
First of all, I don’t think the World Cup will be completely invisible. After all, today’s media are showing that you can also use other channels [als das klassische Fernsehen – Anm. d. Red.] You can watch football if you really want to. But it’s about the general public. We have a tournament that isn’t on primetime because it’s on a different continent. We have to live with that anyway. But I have an image in my mind that you still watch the World Cup games together. Maybe at school as a lesson, or for employers to say: ‘Okay, let’s extend the breakfast break a bit and watch the Women’s World Cup.’ As a trainer and as a person, I am solution-oriented.
Instead of saying why it doesn’t work, you should find a way how to do it. Otherwise it would be the absolute worst signal we could give right now. Because quite apart from actual football, we have [als Nationalmannschaft] also a social mission. To be honest, I’m stunned because I don’t understand why you can’t agree. If that’s the case, someone would have to explain it to me.
Unfortunately, we are seeing more and more serious injuries in women’s football, such as torn cruciate ligaments. Do you see a specific reason for this?
There are also more injuries among men, simply because the strain is getting higher and higher. The pressure is increasing, the number of games is increasing, the intensity of the game has changed, the speed of the game. We do more sprints, we run more kilometers. That’s why the regeneration phases should actually be longer, but there is currently no time window for that. Last year, my players declared the term stress control or stress management to be a nonsense, but of course it is our responsibility [als Trainerteam]to look at it holistically. In addition, women are more at risk of suffering a cruciate ligament rupture purely from a physiological point of view.
What do you think needs to change to reduce risk?
We should actually invest even more in prevention and detailed stress management and take a close look at each player’s profile individually. And yet we wouldn’t be able to prevent every risk, because football is a contact sport. But we all have to question ourselves again about how responsibly we deal with certain things. I can speak for our coaching team and for our players: In the past three years we have taken the strain on individual players very seriously. With the result that you couldn’t always get used to it. Instead, we said very clearly: We put our players at the center of our thoughts – and the time we have on the training ground and in preparation must simply be enough. Sometimes you have to make a compromise.
Former national player Martina Voss-Tecklenburg, born in 1967, won the European Championship four times during her playing days with the DFB women. She has been the national coach of the German women’s national team since 2018, and in 2022 she led the team to the vice-European championship.
The interview was adapted from English. Interviewed by Oliver Moody.