Marie-Louise Eta has already made history. The Dresden native, 32 years old, is the first woman on a coaching bench in the men’s Bundesliga. She is there as assistant to Marco Grote, who is temporarily taking over the job of Urs Fischer, who has resigned, as interim coach at 1. FC Union Berlin.
“It’s not a conscious decision to have a woman as an assistant coach. I also think that would almost discredit this decision. For me, she is a trained football teacher,” said President Dirk Zingler. “I look at her exactly the same way, whether she is a woman or a man. It was a decision for a soccer teacher who works in a team.”
How long the commitment will last is unclear. There is currently an international break, the Iron Men will play their next Bundesliga game on November 25th against FC Augsburg. It is quite possible that the club management will have found a successor for the extremely successful Fischer by then and that Grote and Eta will return to the U19s, which they have previously coached. Names circulating in Berlin include former Frankfurt coach Oliver Glasner and Bo Svensson, who recently resigned from Mainz.
It is also possible that Eta and Grote will stay in their new jobs longer. The search for a coach is a “careful process” that we want to approach without any time pressure, said Zingler.
For Eta, who was born Marie-Louise Bagehorn, a dream that she worked hard to achieve comes true. In the winter of 2022, she told the football specialist magazine “kicker” that she could imagine many things: “At some point, taking over a youth national team, working as an assistant coach in the men’s professional leagues, coaching a women’s Bundesliga team, as well as U -17 or U-19 boys.” She has already achieved some of her goals.
When she was just 13, she left her hometown of Dresden for Potsdam. There she went through the youth departments at 1. FFC Turbine Potsdam and was promoted to the first team in 2008. After a stint at Hamburger SV, she played for Werder Bremen for four years and achieved promotion to the 1st Bundesliga. At the age of 26, she switched sides and began her coaching training with Werder’s male U15 team. Later she was a member of various coaching staffs for DFB youth teams.
At the end of February 2022, she got a place in the DFB’s Pro License course. She went to school next to Hansi Flick’s former assistant Danny Röhl. Before the aptitude test, she was under a lot of stress: “I walked around all day with what felt like a heart rate of 300 and I put a lot of pressure on myself because I obviously wanted to put my best foot forward and there were a few challenges. That was one Intense day and a beautiful emotional chaos.”
This week alone may have caused emotional chaos in the Eta house. It was only on Monday that the regional league team Weiche Flensburg parted ways with Benjamin Eta after a sobering start to the season. Two days later, his wife Marie-Louise is in the headlines.
Sources: DPA, “transfermarkt.de”
