Marie-Louise Eta at Union Berlin: it shouldn’t be a milestone

Pictured: Alamein FC’s Under 13 VYPLG Head Coach and Senior NPLW Assistant Coach Amy Crawford, being soaked in water for ‘good luck’ ahead of the U13s first game of the 2026 season. (Which they won.)

There was a milestone moment in German football this week that will have positive ramifications for female football around the world, and here at Alamein, we couldn’t be happier about it. But it shouldn’t have been a milestone.

Marie-Louise Eta stepped into a top-flight head coaching role at Union Berlin and, in doing so, became the first woman to hold a Head Coach position across all of Europe’s major leagues. This has been celebrated as an important “first,” and rightly so.

But the more interesting question is not how long it took to get here, but what happens next.

Since the ban on female participation in football was lifted in the 1970s, women have been present, but not fully trusted. Trusted to play, but not always to lead. Trusted to participate, but not to expect excellence. Trusted to follow instructions, but not always to make decisions in the environments where those decisions matter most.

But when a club like Union Berlin trusts a woman to lead a top-tier men’s team, they help to reshape expectations everywhere. And at Alamein, that’s the outcome that interests us the most. Because leadership is not something that happens in isolation. We see it as something that is learned, absorbed and normalised over time.

When a young player comes through a system where women coach, women set standards, women make decisions and women are accountable for performance, they don’t think it’s unusual or “a milestone” when other women do the same. Leadership doesn’t feel like something for girls to aspire to in the abstract… it simply feels like part of the game.

That ordinary expectation is more important than any single appointment, because by the time our young players reach the top levels of the sport (whether as athletes, coaches or administrators), their sense of what is normal will already have been shaped.

They don’t arrive asking whether women belong in these roles. They arrive expecting women to be there.

That is how the game changes properly. Not through isolated breakthroughs, but through environments that make those breakthroughs inevitable.

There is still a long way to go, and the fact that we are still talking about this “first” in 2026 is a reminder of that.

But every “first” does something important: it moves the line, even slightly, on what people see as credible, acceptable and expected. And over time, those small shifts accumulate.

The real milestone will come when the gender of a new coach can pass without comment. When a woman leading at the highest level of the game is no longer something to point out, and when the only discussion is around where she is going to take her team.