Twenty kilometers north of Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion is the village of Bork, a typical German Dorf in many tactics with a bakery, a Catholic church and a part-time fire station, staffed by local volunteers, punctuating a residential and rural landscape.
On a quiet Saturday afternoon in early June, the remote sound of cheers and low-budget pyrotechnics can be heard echoing down Main Street at 2:50 p. m. m.
PSV Bork is the final tier of Borussia Dortmund’s season in the sixth tier of women’s football. Dortmund won 24 of 24 this season, scored 143 goals, conceded five and finished the crusade 19 times ahead of their nearest opponents. In early summer sunshine, visiting Borussia Dortmund is not something that happens, and a few hundred enthusiasts from both sides are here under the blue sky to see it.
“We are a small team, we don’t even have a stadium, but to have Borussia Dortmund here is a real honour for us,” one PSV Bork supporter told DW. “They will bet on the highest point in a few years. Other people here don’t need to miss the opportunity to see them. “
Dortmund is in a project to succeed in the Frauen Bundesliga (the women’s Bundesliga). In lifestyles since 2021, the club has already won back-to-back titles and secured two of the six promotions it wants for its dream of moving up from the seventh division. , the elite Kreisliga ruled through this season’s champions Bayern Munich and German women’s football giant: VfL Wolfsburg.
Svenja Schlenker appointed for Dortmund to one day rub shoulders with them. She is a lifelong fan and has been with the club for 16 years, starting as an intern in the marketing branch in 2007 and rising to become the most sensible of women. American football.
“Our big goal is to play in the Bundesliga in a few years,” Schlenker told DW. “Of course, we must arrive as soon as possible. I need to climb every year and that’s what control expects. “Try not to pass that fatigue to the coaches and coaching staff but they know that the first 3 or 4 years deserve to perform easily. Then it becomes more difficult.
When Schlenker ascended to his current position in October 2020, he faced an overwhelming challenge: creating a professional football team. He had less than a year to gather everything in time for the team’s debut in 2021, when the coronavirus pandemic took over the world.
“They said, ‘Ask what you want, we’ll help you with any challenges you have,’ but they really let me do it. However, they give me all the help I want and literally support me and the team. “
“It’s like a puzzle with many pieces and I didn’t know where to start. I had to locate coaches, a team and the pandemic made things even more complicated. “
Schlenker found a coach in Thomas Sulewski, who had guided SpVg Berghofen to promotion to the current Bundesliga in 2020. The 32-year-old took advantage of the possibility of playing a prestigious role very different from the previous one. One on the outskirts of Dortmund.
While Berghofen plays on a pitch in a forest with modest amenities shared with clubs, Dortmund plays its home matches in the shadow of the celebrated Westfalenstadion at Stadion Rote Erde, the club’s former pitch where the men’s team celebrated titles and played the European Cup Games. in the 1950s and 1960s.
Although BVB is still an amateur with no professionalization calendar, its home, equipped with newly renovated conversions and assembly rooms, is and, above all, theirs.
Although their resources are far greater than those they compete with lately, Dortmund’s women are still unable to expand into a network of exploration. As a result, Schlenker and Sulewski tested to make the organization more productive for their first team and, starting in 2022, the reserves. Lately they have 50 players on their chips.
Everyone is eligible to check their luck in the trials, but in the beginning, all players had to meet two key criteria before kicking a ball: they had to live within a 35-kilometre radius of Dortmund and they had to be a Dortmund. admirer.
“We think that because we started at the lowest level, why do we have players from Cologne or elsewhere?So we set this rule that we only decide on local girls. We have those quiet regulations now, however, I can say that there are No Schalke enthusiasts in the team!”
One of the players bleeding black and yellow is Mia Bedarf. The attacking midfielder joined Iserlohn, a club outside Dortmund, in 2022. There she was champion in the 2021-22 season and when the opportunity to play for Dortmund presented itself, she did. Do not hesitate to stop by the apartment to put on the marked shirt.
“I was born and raised in Dortmund, this is the club I have supported all my life,” Bedarf told DW. It’s just a small component of the history of this club, it’s amazing and I’m honoured.
“There’s a lot of excitement for us and excitement for where we’re headed. I see it with my friends, my circle of family and enthusiasts,” the 25-year-old said after being replaced in the current role at Bork. “Just look around, in a position like this, 30 or 40 minutes from Dortmund, we have a lot of enthusiasts following us. So we feel that and it’s just amazing. “
The elephant in the room remains precisely why Dortmund took so long to create a women’s team. When they set the wheels in motion in 2019, they were already recognised as the biggest European club.
“I’ve been interested in women’s and women’s football. When I started applying for BVB in 2007, one of my first questions was: ‘Hey, where can I play football at this club, my club?Is there a women’s team?” The answer was no, we’re not really thinking about that right now,” Schlenker says.
At one point, the factor turned political, with enthusiasts unfurling a banner on the yellow wall of a men’s German Cup match against Paderborn in November 2019 that read: “Football is for everyone: the women’s team now!”This was timed just before the match. The club’s AGM when the board was back asked through enthusiasts about the absence of a women’s team.
“Borussia Dortmund has focused for many years on the good fortune of our women’s handball and table tennis team. Maybe we were worried about managing too many teams,” says Schlenker.
The banner spurred Dortmund into action. After the move to release a women’s team passed, the next step was to create a concentrated internal organization that would talk about the assignment and all its considerations.
All in conditions for Borussia Dortmund to integrate a team into the pyramid of women’s football for the 2021/22 season, but at what level?
While interest and investment in women’s football has been well received, established Bundesliga men’s clubs, and especially those with external sponsors, are floating around in more sensible women’s football.
“There will come a day when all the most productive groups in Germany play in the Frauen Bundesliga and then it will be more attractive,” Schlenker said. “The big clubs have bigger facilities, structures, medical services. This point of professionalism will be to attract the most productive players and make the Frauen Bundesliga even more popular in the coming years. “
The last 11 Frauen Bundesliga titles were won by either Bayern or Wolfsburg, while this season’s third-place Eintracht Frankfurt earned their place in the league by merging with FFC Frankfurt’s record women’s champions in 2020 and soaking up their senior women’s team. team. .
While RB Leipzig have just secured promotion to the Bundesliga and are about to fit the first second-division team to triumph in the German Cup final, classic giants Turbine Potsdam, the latest team besides Bayern or Wolfsburg to win the Frauen Bundesliga, have been relegated. Not being able to compete.
Borussia Dortmund also had the option of simply buying the license of an existing women’s club and entering the pyramid at a higher level, but no, opting to start from the bottom on a limited budget.
“Of course we have to succeed at the top, but possibly not just play subsidized football from the beginning,” BVB CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke told Kicker magazine’s “FE: male view on football” podcast last year.
“If we entered the arena like Borussia Dortmund, it would be complicated for other clubs [to compete]. So we must consciously start from the back because we don’t need to kill groups right away. Possibly we wouldn’t and we spend 3 times the budget of other groups just because we are Borussia Dortmund. We don’t need to buy all the most productive players of the moment or in the 3rd division. “
For coach Sulewski, the most is not how temporarily Dortmund reaches the top, but that they do it in the right way. The coach believes they will reap the rewards in the coming years by a patient technique now.
“We wanted to do things authentically and honestly,” Sulewski told DW. “That’s why we said we would start from the bottom and move forward step by step within a framework that puts us in a very smart position 10 years from now.
“By giving ourselves time, we can build the infrastructure that the club possibly wouldn’t have yet. This can also be super vital for women. If we had in the regional leagues, we would be only two promotions away from the most sensible thing now. “And we probably wouldn’t know how it all works. We want this knowledge, we want this time. I think we have chosen the right path.
If all goes well, 2027 is the year Dortmund can compete with Bayern, Wolfsburg and RB Leipzig, but now they are only focusing on the intervening years.
“We want to be more and more professional in each and every one of the departments. We’ll build a network of browsers to update our public tests, for example. Demanding situations will grow, but so will the team around me,” says Schlenker.
Like Dortmund, the moment in Bork, already 5-0, is the women’s Champions League final across the Dutch border in Eindhoven. The dream is that Dortmund will one day participate in such games, and Bedarf is sure that this will happen.
“This team has the ambition to do well and one day will compete at the top. I am convinced that one day it will be just us. “
Edited by Matt Pearson