BERLIN — “Third place is for men,” read the advertisements for the Women’s World Cup here in Germany, billboards of large white letters painted on a green soccer field. “Boys, we will avenge you,” was the slightly more collegial version.
Both signs referred to the third-place finish by the men’s team in South Africa last summer and the women’s team’s status as the two-time defending world champions. The jest may be in good fun, but it sometimes feels as if the men’s game is the only measuring stick against which success can be defined for the women.
In a sports market where men’s soccer dominates every other sport, whether basketball, hockey, handball or auto racing, the bar may be set so high that even the notable success of this World Cup so far can look like failure by comparison.
It was not enough for FIFA to report that the 14.1 million Germans who tuned in to watch their team open the World Cup with a victory was a record for televised women’s soccer here. The soccer association had to note that it surpassed by around 10 percent the average rating for Germany’s loss to Serbia in South Africa in 2010. What FIFA did not add was that the comparison was hardly fair, given that the men’s match took place in the middle of a workday and that millions of Germans played hooky from their jobs to watch.
“Even as a nonsports fan you can’t escape the men’s matches, the televisions set up in every single restaurant, the roar of the crowds through your window after every goal,” said Jakob Augstein, publisher of Freitag, a small Berlin-based left-leaning weekly. Augstein wrote a column for the popular Web site Spiegel Online calling the soccer mania now gripping the nation an “artificial hype,” drummed up by sponsors and the news media, one that “does nothing for the more important goal of women’s equality,” he said.
Even more viewers tuned in Thursday night, 16.4 million, to watch Germany eke out a 1-0 win over Nigeria. Yet after the victory the streets of Berlin were not filled with honking caravans of cars draped with black, red and gold flags, as they were after victories last summer by the men’s team.
The truth lies somewhere between the spectacular marketing push and the unfair comparisons to the men’s game. The tournament has been by most other measures a success, garnering an unprecedented level of attention, even if it has not achieved anything like the nationwide saturation that the so-called Summer Fairytale of the men’s World Cup in 2006 accomplished in Germany.
And attitudes toward the tournament do not split along predictable gender lines. A survey on behalf of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit of a representative sample of 1,056 people shortly before the tournament found that a larger share of men was excited about the Women’s World Cup than women. While 63 percent of men were looking forward to the tournament, just 43 percent of women were.
If women’s soccer is ever going to break through to the mainstream, Germany would seem to be the place. The women’s team is a dominant force in international soccer, having won not only the past two World Cups but five straight European championships. The tournament has a murderers’ row of sponsors, from the financial giants Commerzbank and Allianz to the national postal service and the rail lines, Deutsche Post and Deutsche Bahn.
The World Cup has been inescapable on newsstands and television. The grocery store Rewe is giving away collectible stickers of the players. The popular Sunday night crime series “Tatort” featured an episode about women’s soccer a week before the tournament kicked off, pulling in 8.27 million viewers. And for the first time, every game will be broadcast on one of Germany’s two public television networks, ARD and ZDF.
A crew from ZDF showed up Thursday night to interview fans at Lido, an old movie theater turned music hall in the traditionally counterculture neighborhood of Kreuzberg. Around 600 soccer fans filled it to capacity Thursday for an event organized by the women’s soccer magazine 11 Friends, a quarterly supplement to a men’s soccer magazine. From about 30 pages when the first version appeared in 2009, the special issue for the Cup had grown to 100 pages.
Jens Kirschneck, the magazine’s editor in chief, said that when the first issue came out, a subscriber returned the women’s soccer supplement to the office “neatly torn into one thousand pieces,” to register his disapproval. Thursday night there were as many men as women watching the game at Lido.
“You really do an injustice to the women’s game when you constantly compare it to the men’s game,” Kirschneck said. “The men have a tradition dating back to 1900 or before, whereas the women were forbidden to play until 1970.”
That is because the same soccer association that organized and promoted this World Cup, known here by the initials DFB, passed a rule in 1955 preventing its member clubs from allowing women to play.
Since the rule was repealed in 1970, the women’s game has rapidly advanced, but interest in professional teams remains a small fraction of what it is for the Cup. Annette Wurth came out to watch the game at Lido to have fun and show her support. She said she became a fan of the sport rooting for the men’s professional club Bayern Munich. Asked if she would go to see games featuring Bayern’s women’s team, which finished fifth in the recently completed season, she asked with evident surprise, “They have a team?”
Her response would not surprise Bayern Manager Uli Hoeness, who complained Thursday night that a mere 200 spectators turn up to a typical women’s match, compared with the nearly 70,000 who pack themselves into the Allianz Arena for men’s matches.
“The truth will come after the World Cup,” Hoeness told reporters in Munich. “I wish that the hype for the ladies soccer continues after the World Cup, but it looks quite different in practice.”
During Sunday’s opening game, 74,000 spectators, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, were on hand for the opening match between Germany and Canada. And according to the German soccer association, all of the German team’s games are sold out.
Yet only 28,000 of a possible 45,000 tickets were sold in Mönchengladbach for Brazil’s 1-0 victory over Australia on Wednesday. And that was despite the presence of the biggest star in women’s soccer, Marta, the winner of the FIFA World Women’s Player of the Year award five years running.
Jana Wiske, 36, has worked for the soccer magazine Kicker for 11 years and can remember when women’s soccer was covered with the attitude, “if there’s a little room left we can include something.” If she had to name a turning point, it would be 2003, when the magazine had not sent anyone to cover the World Cup in the United States. After Germany upset the United States in the semifinals, she was told to board a plane for Los Angeles the next day.
Now it would be unthinkable for the magazine not to cover the women’s Cup. And Wiske, whose mother forbade her to play soccer as a girl because it was “unladylike,” said that the reaction to this summer’s event, and more important the wide acceptance across German society, already has exceeded her wildest expectations.
“I think today,” Wiske said, “my mother would let me play.”
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