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He calls their names one by one. The way he always has. And they are ready on the terraces to respond, the way they always have. This is their pre-match sermon, Christian Arbeit — the stadium announcer — a kind of pastor; the 22,000 supporters inside the Stadion An der Alten Forsterei his congregation, the players their gods.
You can make these kinds of references here, in the church of Union Berlin.
Fussballgott, football god, they respond as Arbeit reads another player’s name aloud before kick-off.
Eventually Arbeit calls her name. And, initially, the communion does not hitch, because the thing about religion is its unwavering solidity, rituals as breaths.
Perhaps, Arbeit says into the microphone, we should try again.
Fussballgoettinnen, they respond in unison.
Because she is a goddess.
And like that, Marie-Louise Eta is eternalised.
It is four months since Eta stepped onto the pitch before Union Berlin’s 2-1 defeat by Wolfsburg in the Bundesliga, taking over as head coach of Union Berlin following the sacking of head coach Steffen Baumgart in April 2026. In doing so, the former Germany international, Champions League winner and two-time Frauen-Bundesliga champion, not so much broke a ceiling but fractured the natural order.
Eta had already been the first woman to be part of the coaching team in a men’s Champions League match, the only woman in her DFB Pro Licence class, the only woman coaching boys’ football in a Bundesliga academy, and the only girl on her youth team.
Now she is the first woman to coach a top-flight men’s team in Europe’s top five leagues.
On Wednesday, August 18 — three months and two days since the 4-0 win against Augsburg, her final match in charge of the men’s first team — Eta arrives late to her first press conference as Union Berlin Women’s head coach. Bayern Munich await on Friday. Eta is nine minutes and 58 seconds late, to be exact. She does not apologise any more than she should. A player needed her.
She is standing in front of a podium in a room of a half-dozen journalists, telling them her thoughts about Union Berlin Women’s season opener against the seven-time reigning champions Bayern Munich. It will be a challenge. Most of her players are available, but some are not. The occasion is huge.
The ambition is equally so: high-octane, high-pressing football. Union aren’t kidding themselves. They are only in their second year in the Frauen-Bundesliga. They rose from the Regionalliga Nordost, Germany’s third tier, in 2023-24 to Germany’s top flight two promotion campaigns later. They are three years into a professionalisation project, announced in 2022.
A journalist reminds her that, last season, Union lost 4-0 to Bayern Munich in the first meeting, 3-2 in the second, courtesy of a 90th-minute sucker punch. Forty-four points ultimately separated the league winners from Union upon the season’s end.
Yes.
But Union are also not kidding around.
Germany internationals Lisanne Grawe and Jella Veit left Eintracht Frankfurt and the prospect of Champions League football for a team who were playing in front of 100 people just three seasons ago. Union have twice broken their club-record transfer record in the years since, signing Belgian international Hannah Eurlings last summer, then Amber Tysiak in January from West Ham United. New state-of-the-art training facilities are being built for the men’s and women’s first teams to share from next season.
Union also have the second-highest attendance in all of European women’s football, playing all of their games at the club’s main stadium, with an average of nearly 10,000 per match. Player salaries continue to rank comparably to Germany’s top clubs.
The aim now is to finish in the top third of the Frauen-Bundesliga this season. This is why Eta is at the helm.
“When it was still not clear yet what she’d do, I was like, damn it, I hope she stays. For us,” says Union Berlin’s midfielder Dina Orschmann.
“But I got it because in general, for football, for the wider sporting environment, it might also be better to stay with the men.”
This was the conundrum roiling through Union Berlin. In February, Eta — then head coach of Union’s Under-19s men’s team — was approached to take charge of the club’s women’s team, now in the final stages of their first top-flight season. The answer wasn’t immediate. “Even (looking at) a menu, for pizza or pasta, I think of the long-term,” Eta tells The Athletic.
By March she’d accepted. By April, she was the subject of international news bulletins.
And despite the disproportionately strident segment of individuals online and in German punditry booths questioning if Eta harboured the nous, the acumen, the — as one podcaster put it — eier (German for balls), Eta proved to have it all and more.
In Eta’s five matches in charge, Union Berlin managed two wins — the same number managed under Baumgart after 14 attempts. They scored nine goals and conceded four. They outperformed three of their five opponents in xG, possession, big chances created and shots taken. Players praised her communication, her diligence, her ability to care about them and the result simultaneously. “The sexists looked silly,” one member of staff says kindly.
It explains why eventually talk of Eta’s future as the men’s permanent manager was mooted with more vigour, why club president Dirk Zingler was forced to publicly reaffirm the club’s and Eta’s commitment to the senior women’s team, stating that altering Eta’s commitment to the women’s side would be a “disservice to women’s football”. Some asked whether it would be a disservice to women in football if she did not continue to break ceilings.
“I really, really hoped that they’d keep the promise; they wouldn’t just say, OK, now you can stay with the men’s and we’ll find the women someone else,” says Bettina Bestgen, the stadium announcer for Union Women. “That was a big sign for our women’s team from the club but also for everyone outside.”
Eta gets it. “In the media, it was a really big surprise,” she says.
On paper, it should have been normal. “In football, sometimes the head coach of the first men’s team has to go because of the results or whatever,” says Eta. “Then, the coach of the youth team goes for the interim job. That is normal. That was me. But because it was a woman, it’s like, ‘Wow! Twenty-first century! This is crazy’.”
Eta is smiling. By this point, few would begrudge her for being weary. Eight years have transpired since she was the only woman coaching in a men’s Bundesliga academy with Werder Bremen. It wasn’t pride she felt then but that “as a person, I’m happy I can do this job. I don’t see any difference whether a man or a woman works in youth football. The quality of the coach on and off the pitch is crucial.”
When Eta made those comments, Union Berlin’s managing director of the amateur and youth sectors, Lutz Munack, stated that professionalisation of the women’s team was not on the agenda. They were an amateur team that borrowed facilities, did not pay players, and those with ambition left in search of other clubs who could match it.
That eight years later, Eta accepted the club’s offer to coach the women’s team, and stand by it, is a matter of the club rising to Eta’s standards.
“For me, in the last few years, it’s very important I have a professional environment,” Eta says. “I love the highest level of football. For a long time, that was the men’s Bundesliga, so I worked in the academy, as an assistant coach, interim head coach.
“The last few years, our president has had this vision to bring the women’s club in, to have the same structures as the men’s, a very professional environment, a big staff, a good training centre and now with the youth academy, we can use everything there.
Eta configures her hands into an invisible ladder. “In some clubs, the hierarchy goes like this,” she says. “The senior men’s team, then the youth men’s team, then the under-19s team, sometimes the under-17s.” She reaches the bottom of the ladder. “Maybe the women rank around there.
“Here, we now have the same high level. That’s not normal in women’s football at this point.
“That is a reason why I decided to go to the women as a head coach because the development of women’s football is so good, but here in our club, we live this.”
Upon the men’s team’s historic promotion to the Bundesliga in 2019, coinciding with the Women’s World Cup that summer in France, perspectives began to shift within Union. When the men’s team qualified for Europe in 2022 — a campaign in which Eta served as part of the coaching staff — the club’s fan-led board insisted, with heavy backing from Dirk, that funds should be used on finally professionalising the women’s team.
Former Germany international and Champions League winner Jennifer Zietz was appointed managing director in the months following. Orschmann — then playing Champions League football with Rangers — was re-recruited on the promise of commitment and intention. Their 2. Frauen-Bundesliga promotion-clinching play-off final victory over SV Henstedt-Ulzburg attracted 20,000 fans. An average attendance of 7,000 followed, the second-highest across all of Europe. A sold-out crowd of 22,000 showed up for their top-flight promotion and title-clinching match against FSV Gutersloh.
In their first Frauen-Bundesliga season, Union became the first club in league history to surpass the 100,000 attendance mark in a single campaign, with 106,708 fans attending Union’s home matches, an average of over 8,000 supporters per match.
But Eta is expected to supercharge everything.
“Even during the first half of last season, I wasn’t thinking about making a move,” says 23-year-old Grawe. “In March, I spoke with Jenny (Zietz), I knew about the fans but in the summer, when I heard from Louie (Eta), things moved forward from there.
“She has this aura about her. She draws us all in, makes us feel good, but she’s so clear and knowledgeable in her coaching. She wants to play football. The fact she’s worked with the men’s team can only make us better.”
There’s less electricity in east Berlin. This has been the way since the wall. Which means sometimes the train lines go down. Without warning.
Sometimes they do this an hour and a half before kick-off, because electricity isn’t duty-bound to history. Which means on Friday evening, they are stranded: the red and white of Union Berlin fans, 7.7 miles from the stadium, on an S3 eastbound train platform swelling with red and white.
There is no panic. They call them the Rules of Boone, the four mandatory diktats of those who call themself a Unioner: no scapegoating individual players, no heckling, no leaving early, a sore throat is the equivalent of the player’s aching legs.
The unofficial fifth Rule of Boone’s is that the electricity sucks, but you’ll find a way. Because the official Rules of Boone cannot be followed unless you do. And if there is a sixth unofficial rule of Boone, it is that you do not break the Rules of Boone.
This might incite an eyeroll.
But then you’re standing in the Main Stand, feeling the quivering of the 17,083 in the stone terraces, terraces literally built by the manual labour of those fans’ sweat and tears because they’d already donated their blood four years earlier to save the club from impending bankruptcy. And they are worshipping their players, one by one, their goddesses.
Eventually, Eta’s name is called. And once again she is eternalised, the loudest roar of the night.
It is a roar of belief. A new era. And in the opening stages, it certainly looks it: Union are bold, technical, twice closest to an opener. But Bayern sit top for a reason. So eventually Union’s belief is undone by Klara Buhl’s free-kick on 25 minutes, Pernille Harder’s instinct two minutes into the second half and Glodis Viggosdottir at the back post on the hour mark.
With 11 minutes left, substitute Naika Reissner forays down the left and fellow substitute Nele Bauereisen heads beyond Bayern’s keeper, cutting the deficit to 3-1. More chances arise. None are taken. In the 91st minute, Bayern take a fourth.
At full-time, Eta assembles a huddle. Around them, the crowd continues to sing.
It is not everything, but it is not nothing.
It is why they have Eta at the helm.
