Turbine Potsdam has been a guarantee for particularly good and successful football among women for many decades. Victories, cups, titles abound – but this season the Bundesliga club is a relegation candidate. The club falls into chaos. Shortly before the restart, the coach also resigns.
Championships in a row, cup wins in a row, plus two international titles in today’s Champions League. Turbine Potsdam. A name like a proud exclamation. Tradition, GDR tradition even. An all-women’s football club that is at the top of the list of licensed clubs that also have women’s teams. Until now. Because Turbine Potsdam does not crumble slowly, the club smashes with a bang this season.
Where countless victories were once celebrated, the new reality is a very bitter one. Even if the really big successes were a long time ago, the Brandenburg women only just missed out on qualifying for the premier class last year. But now nothing works anymore. Bottom of the table, only one point from ten games, the saving shore already nine points away. The first relegation from the Bundesliga is threatening. The end of the DFB Cup was already sealed in the round of 16.
Interim coach Sven Weigang also left the club for the league restart this weekend. “I’m fine with that, I wanted to help, but it didn’t fit,” he is quoted as saying by the “Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung”. This means that Turbine is without a coach before the game against second-placed FC Bayern (1 p.m. in the ntv.de live ticker). Once again. In any case, Weigang was only the replacement for Sebastian Middeke, who was released in October and only took up his post in the summer. There is little that gives hope in Potsdam. The club hasn’t known peace and stability for a long time.
By the summer of 2021 at the latest, the unrest spilled over into the public eye. At that time, ex-player Tabea Kemme threw her hat in the ring after her career ended, she wanted to become the new president of her former club and initiate new ideas and changes. The now 31-year-old lost ten votes against the then incumbent Rolf Kutzmutz, it was a “dirty election campaign”, Kemme then summed it up in the “Spiegel”. She was not “competed against someone, but for the cause, for the club”, but apparently not everyone understood that. For example, Bernd Schröder, who has been a guarantee of success for many years, turned against his former player. He was concerned “about losing power, about pride, selfishness. He was afraid of losing his life’s work,” said Kemme, who then left the club and ended her commitment.
So the ancestors stayed on the lever, but it wasn’t like it used to be. Last summer there was a big crash and a lot got out of control. Coach Sofian Chahed was surprisingly fired half a year after his contract extension, Kutzmutz took that personally and also resigned. In addition, a large part of the squad left the club. Apparently, the players “didn’t see a profound future at Turbine,” said the new president, Karsten Ritter-Lang, to the sports information service. A huge upheaval, which can hardly be managed, had to be initiated. Ritter-Lang spoke of “turbulence” and “irritations”.
Ex-players complained to the RBB about poor pitch and training conditions, communication problems and a lack of adaptation to modern football. “We didn’t feel like we could just focus on football,” said one of the women who didn’t want their names published. “We’ve had a lot of talks, very, very often raising the same issues, that we need more staff and the conditions have to change,” said another ex-player.
The completely reorganized squad prompted the pundits to fret even before the start of the season. Instead of national players, rather unknown, young forces came into the club – then there were also rows of injuries. The load control was “unfortunately only moderately taken into account in the summer months until October,” said Ritter-Lang. Defender Wibke Meister also complained to Magenta Sport afterwards that the team had not laid any foundations in the preparation. One of the reasons why you couldn’t continue with Middeke, according to Ritter-Lang.
The president himself judged: “The club has imploded.” Well-known and successful players are not attracted by this. Four young women came to Potsdam during the winter transfer period, none of whom had yet made a name for themselves. Other clubs have long offered rosy prospects for the future. With SGS Essen there is only one other pure women’s soccer club in the league, VfL Wolfsburg and FC Bayern have been dominant for years. Eintracht Frankfurt is also becoming a top club, and since the merger with 1. FFC Frankfurt, the once traditional club has been on the up again with more support. With RB Leipzig, another top-class men’s licensed club is also pushing up from the 2nd division, the women only just missed out on promotion.
“The clubs put a lot of heart and soul into what they do, so I’m kind of sad that the clubs might not be in the Bundesliga at some point,” said today’s player advisor Lena Goeßling ntv.de about the fewer and fewer all-women teams. “But at some point the licensing clubs will simply have better conditions in the long term. They simply have other options and Potsdam doesn’t have them anymore, and Essen doesn’t either.”
At Turbine, the cooperation with Hertha BSC will also be canceled in the coming summer, which the Berliners will end after three years because they want to set up a women’s department themselves. The club will therefore be missing a six-digit sum in the future, 250,000 euros are being rumored. In a league where the most expensive winter transfer cost 50,000 euros (Tuva Hansen to FC Bayern), that’s a big chunk of money.
But the problem still lies in the future, there are enough problems that currently exist. Above all, the acute danger of relegation: Not thinking about this scenario “would be more than unrealistic,” said Ritter-Lang. In the game against Bayern, the Potsdam women are clear outsiders. “But maybe it’s not wrong that we have nothing to lose in the game, but can play relatively freely,” goalkeeper Vanessa Fischer told RBB. “We have nothing to lose. We can’t fall any lower,” said Dirk Heinrichs, assistant coach at Turbine for 20 years.
Fischer emphasized: “The important games come after that against Duisburg and Bremen, where we have to take points.” Bremen is only one place better than Turbine with four points, Duisburg in tenth on the first non-relegation zone has at least ten points on the account. “If someone starts to have doubts, there’s no point,” Heinrichs said. “The belief has to be there, otherwise we wouldn’t need to play anymore,” said the champion at Magenta Sport. However, she also explained: “If you only have one point after ten games then you don’t have to be very bright that it’s difficult for us.”
Others see it that way: “Of course I’ll keep my fingers crossed that they keep the class, but it will be a really difficult task,” said ex-player Ariane Hingst, now assistant coach of the U19 and U20 women at the DFB and committed at the Berlin project Viktoria Berlin at Sport 1. “I think that Potsdam unfortunately lived in the past for far too long and failed to develop further, also structurally. The upheaval was missed,” she said openly about what Kemme actively tackle wanted what other ex-players at RBB also criticized.
“Of course it really hurts me to see what has become of the club,” said Hingst, hoping for a turnaround: “I’ve been in the football business for far too long not to know that the impossible can suddenly become possible. Those who are declared dead live longer.” Ritter-Lang is also optimistic about the restart: Even if a descent could be “a time for an absolute restart”, Ritter-Lang is sure “that we can already do it”. However, he said that before Weigang suddenly threw down. Chaos is the new tradition at Turbine.
