Earlier this month, the French second-division club Clermont Foot made headlines by announcing that the Portuguese Helena Costa is going to coach the team in the new season. Costa will be only the third woman to coach a professional men's team. (Carolina Morace was in charge of Italy's Viterbese in 1999, while Nelfi Ibañez Guerra took over Hijos de Acosvinchos last year, after the team had been relegated from the Peruvian second tier.)
When I read all those reports about Helena Costa, it struck me that it was almost exactly 20 years ago that a young lady caused quite a stir in Germany by becoming the first woman to effectively run a Bundesliga club. While Karren Brady, now West Ham's vice-chairman, was taking charge of Birmingham City, another woman was causing a stir in Germany.
The story took place in the district of Bochum called Wattenscheid. In 1994, the local team were in their fourth consecutive Bundesliga season. That was a minior miracle in itself, as kicker magazine described the club as "a corner shop jammed between the supermarkets."
The supermarkets were all the bigger and richer neighbours, of course. And there were not only Schalke and Dortmund. Bochum, Essen and Duisburg all had bigger fan bases than small Wattenscheid with their four-figure average attendance and comparably minuscule budget.
The main reason why Wattenscheid managed to hold their own among these giants for so long was the fashion entrepreneur Klaus Steilmann. In 1958, Steilmann bought a small textile factory in Wattenscheid for 40,000 marks and turned it into a company that would one day employ 18,000 people all over the world and boast an annual revenue of 1.9 billion marks.
Steilmann enjoyed such success not least because he worked fiendishly hard. In 1963, he suffered the first of many heart attacks and was told that he should get more fresh air and do some exercise. There was a young man who earned a few marks by washing Steilmann's car on Saturdays and he told him about the local club. In May, Steilmann went to watch Wattenscheid play away at Hagen in what was then the third tier. Wattenscheid won 2-1 and Steilmann was hooked.
Over time, he became the club's president and patron. He bankrolled Wattenscheid not just through his cash injections, he also employed many players in his company during the 1970s, when most of them were semipros. Steilmann only rarely spent lavishly on transfers, though he did pull off one sensational coup in October 1974. For $200,000, he signed the Argentinian international Carlos Babington to second-division Wattenscheid.
The transfer wasn't the grand success Steilmann had hoped for, not least because Babington's teammates resented the Argentinian's habit of ostentatiously leaving his salary slip lying around the dressing room. Two years later, Babington declared he was homesick, whereupon a Cologne paper said: "He couldn't put his stamp on Wattenscheid, instead the team dragged him down to their level."
So the "Boss", as most everyone at the club called Steilmann, had to wait until 1990 to see his dream become reality. Under former player Hannes Bongartz and led by the goalscoring heroics of young Maurice Banach, Wattenscheid won promotion to the Bundesliga. And, miraculously, stayed there.
Like a king from a fairy tale, or perhaps a biblical parable, Klaus Steilmann had three daughters. Britta, the oldest, was the most restless, creative and successful. She started her own green fashion label and was voted Eco Manager of the Year by the World Wildlife Fund for using natural instead of synthetic fabrics.
But there never seemed to be enough outlets for her boundless energy. In 1993, she travelled to South Dakota with next to no luggage (just four t-shirts and three pairs of blue jeans) to spend three months in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
She wasn't one of those Europeans driven by a misguided romanticism, looking for the noble savage. She knew exactly what she was in for. "Alcoholism, unemployment, kids with no future," she said. "I guess you have to be infected by the social-worker bug to want to help there."
She also wanted to help her father's pet project, Wattenscheid. In early 1994, with the team stuck in the relegation zone, she argued that the club was "a sleeping giant" but that its structures were too old-fashioned. She said Wattenscheid needed a proper business manager, like most of the other clubs in the league had. She also suggested a capable person for the post -- herself.
That was too drastic a novelty for the club's members and the board of directors. Instead they proposed that Britta should run for a seat on the three-man board. With her family background and her smarts, there was little doubt that the members would elect her during the annual general meeting in late March.
Nobody outside of small, unfashionable Wattenscheid really took notice of these developments. Until the team played Leipzig in late February.
It was a crucial game between the two bottom-placed clubs. Bongartz came very close to winning it. But two minutes from time, Leipzig scored the 2-2 equaliser from the penalty spot.
Five days later, the unthinkable happened. The popular Hannes Bongartz, who had broken through as a player with Wattenscheid in the second division while working as a trader for Steilmann's company two decades ago and who had been coaching the team for almost five years now, was fired.
On the next day, the country's biggest tabloid newspaper, Bild, ran a headline that said: "Bundesliga no longer a male preserve! First coach fired by a woman!"
The article said that Britta had talked her father into giving Bongartz the sack. It also called her a "power girl," noted that she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, pointed out that she had a steady boyfriend and concluded: "The business manager coolly ditched Bongartz."
It was technically not quite correct, as Britta didn't have an official post at the club at this point -- in fact, she had become a member only two weeks earlier. And even when she did sit on the board in later years, she was never officially called the business manager. But that 300-word piece in Bild cemented her image as the woman who called the shots.
This image wasn't totally fabricated. Britta had indeed been the leading force behind Bongartz's sacking, she was also the one who picked his successor, Frank Hartmann, another former player. And one year later, in April 1995, she would tell a Berlin newspaper: "By and large, I run the club on my own."
Not everyone liked it. When Wattenscheid played at Duisburg a few hours after the Bild headline about the end of a male preserve, a banner in the away stand read: "We don't need you, Miss Steilmann!" It wasn't just the fact that she was a woman which irritated people. She was also very young -- when the club's members voted her onto the board two weeks after the Bongartz sacking, she'd just turned 28.
Then there was her passionate zeal. A Hamburg weekly called her "a young Mother Teresa for footballers, allergy sufferers and Lakota Indians," and wondered where she found the time and the energy to juggle all these balls. After all, shortly after she had been made one of Wattenscheid's directors, she also became an adviser to the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, a man who was about to run for Chancellor.
A young woman, who had been virtually unknown outside of the fashion industry at the beginning of the year, was suddenly never out of the news during those months in 1994. In April, she appeared on the country's biggest entertainment television show, Drei Nach Neun. She had become a celebrity. Everybody wanted a piece of her, because she possessed a quick wit, a sharp tongue and good looks.
It all came very close to getting out of hand. In June, the police arrested three men who had planned to kidnap Britta Steilmann and demand 30 million marks ransom money from her father. It wasn't a boyish prank. These men were highly dangerous, hardened career criminals.
A few weeks earlier, Wattenscheid had at long last been relegated from the Bundesliga. The Steilmanns -- father and oldest daughter -- were optimistic that they would bounce back soon. But it never happened. As the team slowly sank down the standings, Britta gradually faded out of the public eye. Before the decade was over, she had left both the club and her father's fashion empire because times were hard and the two just couldn't agree on the right course to save both -- the once proud club and the once big company.
In 2000, Wattenscheid dropped to the third division. Three years later, Klaus Steilmann's company began losing money for the first time in its history. It was sold in 2006 to prevent a bankruptcy. Klaus Steilmann died in 2009. In the following year, Wattenscheid were relegated to the sixth division.
Today, Britta Steilmann lives with her husband, her daughter and plenty of dogs and horses in a house with a large garden and a pond. "For a very long time, my favourite place in the whole world was New York City," she says. "But now it's my home."