German women, football world champions!

The German national team becomes football world champions for the first time

Although East German women had been allowed to play football since the 1950s, it was not an Olympic sport, and a women’s national team was not established until 1988. Women in West Germany who wanted to partake of the “beautiful game” had a harder time: the football authorities banned women’s teams from playing football in an organized league in 1955. The sport was deemed “essentially alien to the nature of women” and “unbecoming of feminine grace”. There were concerns that women could hurt themselves or damage their reputation. Despite the ban, women’s teams played dozens of unofficial international matches. Fearing the establishment of a separate women’s association, the authorities lifted the ban in 1970, and a national team was assembled to compete in the inaugural European Women’s Championship in 1982.

The unified German national team quickly became successful, winning the European Championship four times in ten years and lifting the World Cup on 12 October 2003 in Los Angeles, beating Sweden 2–1 with a golden goal in extra time. Germany thus became the first country to win both the men’s and women’s football World Cups. Women’s football in Germany was here to stay.