Friday Flurry: Union Berlin, FC Nordsjælland and Benfica
The Friday Flurry is a new weekly selection of random Premium stories from WFC’s archives.
This week, an eye on some of WFC’s club-focused features!
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Union Berlin's women's team looking to replicate men's rapid rise
It’s been a big change for those remaining from last season, and one both Zietz and Wigger have worked hard to ensure has been a smooth process, and it appears they’ve got it right given the team’s 100% start to the new league campaign.
“It’s a big change for the girls, for the club and for all the members, everyone associated with the women’s team,” admits Zietz. “It’s not only the way of playing professional football, it’s the life balance of working as a professional football player.
“It’s about sleep, regeneration, nutrition, your main work is now football. You have to get this into the minds of the girls, the coaches. We’ve expanded our staff so much. We now have a video analyst, physiotherapists. It’s a difficult change, to go from hobby to work.”
The change is hammered home by Becker who says in the space of a couple of years they’ve gone from having a handful of staff to now 16 people directly involved with the women, and Zietz is aware that with extra professionalisation, other challenges will start to show themselves as things get more competitive in order to achieve their goals.
“Now we have the problem that we have girls in the team who played football for fun, if we had a game everybody can play. Now it’s about being the best, the best girls play and the difficult thing for them is now not everyone can play. The best players in training play in the game and that’s a difficult thing to change.
“We planned for this season that maybe 80% of the girls will be professional football players in the third league. We don’t think about the league, only about what the next best step is and our goals is to go into the second league. We have a very young team, so we look for older, experienced players who can help in the games, keeping a cool head to win the difficult games. That’s our first goal, then maybe in two to three years we want to be in the Bundesliga. We want to do it like the men, be part of the top division and challenge for many years…”
Read the full article here as Union Berlin look to reach the Bundesliga…
FC Nordsjælland are earning the Right to Dream
The man tasked with connecting all the dots on the pitch itself is Englishman Chris Sargeant, who guided them to their first title and inaugural Champions League campaign.
Despite his heritage, Sargeant’s coaching career has been most synonymous with Canada, where he coached in various universities before taking on different roles in the girls’ youth pathway for the Vancouver Whitecaps.
It’s here he came across former Canada international Carmelina Moscato who was head coach of the Under 20 national team at the time, and when she became FC Nordsjælland head coach in 2021, she brought Sargeant with her as an assistant at first.
“I knew about Right to Dream, a lot of people know about it,” Sargeant admits. “Carm got the head coach job here and called up and asked if I wanted to be her assistant and it was something at the time I wanted to do.
“There was no professional football in Canada at that time. I wanted to test myself but also work with Right to Dream, so it was a bit of a no-brainer if I’m honest and Carm is excellent, so it was pretty easy.”
When Moscato left for Tigres in Mexico a year later, Sargeant took over at the helm and has steered the ship ever since, culminating in this year’s success…
Read the full article here after the club won its first domestic title…
The Inside Story of Benfica's rise from the second division to Champions League last eight
Patão coached the club’s under 17s team and then the under 19s, before becoming head coach for the B team and eventually alongside her youth role helped the first team out as an assistant, the role she was holding when the offer came to replace Andrade.
Halfway through that season, I received the invitation to become head coach of the first team,” recalls Patão. “That's how this whole adventure began, and now I've been in charge of the first team for four years, while still working as the youth coordinator.”
On Tavares’s assertion he wanted a youth team coach to lead the team, she adds “I was initially invited precisely with the idea of having a coach who was from the club, who knew the training methodology, the values and particularities of the club and of women's soccer.
“I think it's increasingly important for women's coaches to have the skills to teach the game. Many women's players haven't had the same training contexts as male players, many of them started later and didn't go through a good training process. It's increasingly important to give players these fundamentals, to know how to interpret and understand the game, to make good decisions derived from a good understanding of the game that they begin to have because they are properly stimulated in training.
“The individual development of their skills is usually achieved when they are younger, however, this is not the reality for many of our players, so it is often up to the professional team coach to work on this development to promote a richer team.”
Patão has led the team to three consecutive first division titles (they were also top in the 2019-20 season which was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic), and now into the Champions League quarter-finals for the first time…
Read the full article here on of Europe’s fastest growing clubs…
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