For football fans who are not very familiar with women’s football, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Germany has been the most successful country in the women’s Champions League to date. Much more surprising for them is probably the fact that FC Bayern Munich, by far the club with the most titles among men, has never triumphed in the women’s premier class.
Frankfurt, Duisburg, Potsdam and Wolfsburg have already won the Champions League in the past – and three of them even before FC Bayern even played a duel in the premier class. Because FCB only made its CL debut in 2009.
Twelve years later it becomes clear what impressive development the club has gone through: The Bayern women have now celebrated three championships in the last six years and have made it to the semi-finals of the Champions League twice. Today it is on the big stage against the seven-time CL winner Lyon – and the FCB is certainly not without a chance.
“If you look at what has happened in the last ten years, it’s unbelievable,” says Bayern sports director Bianca Rech SPOX and GOAL. She wore the FCB jersey herself until 2010 and then returned to Munich in 2016 to take on a management position. FC Bayern had just won two championship titles in a row and temporarily replaced VfL Wolfsburg as number one in Germany, “but I felt something was missing,” said Rech.
Rech: FCB want to become series champions
“I haven’t discovered a plan for the future. That’s why I sat down with the head of women’s football and said, ‘If we want to win titles in the future, we have to put something down in writing,” says Rech. Said, done: “That’s why I have developed a strategy paper that explains where we as FC Bayern want to go, “said the 40-year-old.
“Our vision was to become number one in Germany – but not just for one year,” says Rech. Wolfsburg then won the title four times in a row between 2017 and 2020, but FC Bayern’s goal is and remains, itself to become a serial winner in the league.
Smart transfers are necessary for this to succeed. In this area, Rech has seen a further development at her club in the recent past: “Last year it was a big step for us when we got Hanna Glas and Viviane Asseyi. Players from outside, from big foreign clubs, from big football teams Nations, “says the sports director. “Otherwise it was always the other way around: Melanie Leupolz and Vivienne Miedema left us for England, for example,” she adds.
The big Bayern competitors also come from England and Spain when it comes to the premier class. “There are currently a lot of top clubs that want to win the Champions League and that can spend a lot of money,” explains Rech. “The problem is that there aren’t that many top players yet,” she adds. “If you want someone for a position, there are not five to ten candidates, as is the case with men, but only one player, two, at most three. Then five clubs want this one player,” she says of the problems on the transfer market . The result: “Then it is clear what is happening: The players are getting really expensive,” said Rech.
FC Bayern as a “second family”
FC Bayern was accordingly happy that it worked with a coup in the summer: With Saki Kumagai, a real top star from Lyon came to Munich. “She’s a great player. If the money had been important to her, she would have gone to another club. But she wanted to come to us because of our project and our concept,” says Rech. “The FC Bayern brand is not enough to The Bundesliga is not as popular as the English league, which makes a lot more money with TV rights, “she says of the difficulties Bayern have in an international comparison.
According to Rechs, FCB can score points with its special atmosphere: “It is created by the players and the people who work for the club here. They make sure that you just feel comfortable every day. The foreign players often tell me: ‘ It feels like a second family here, ‘”reports Rech.
As a real unit, FC Bayern now wants to set about achieving the big goal. “When we wrote the strategy paper, our vision was to win the Champions League. We have been developing well since the 2019/20 season, and it was and is our goal to win the Champions League title in the medium term,” confirms Rech. For that to happen, the development of FC Bayern must not be over: “We have to continue to take steps in the right direction,” said Rech. The next one could already follow against Lyon this evening.
