THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · GERMANY
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
Germany are already out of the World Cup.
Paraguay held firm for 120 minutes, drew 1-1 and eliminated the four-time world champions in a penalty shootout that ended 4-3. Germany once again left a major tournament far earlier than expected, this time in the round of 32.
The country’s other national team had completed their own task just over three weeks earlier.
On 5 June, the women’s team defeated Norway 2-0 in Cologne and became the first European side to qualify for the 2027 World Cup in Brazil. They completed the campaign with eighteen goals scored and only one conceded. While the men were still preparing for their journey to North America, the women already knew where they would play their next World Cup.
It could look like a simple reversal of roles: the men are going home and the women are moving forward.
But the history of Germany’s women’s national team runs much deeper.
Before becoming a major power, they had to survive a federation that had decided they should not exist.
In 1955, the German Football Association banned women’s football at its member clubs. The decision applied to West Germany and was justified with arguments that presented the sport as a threat to the players’ health, morality and supposed femininity. Affiliated clubs were forbidden from forming women’s teams or allowing them to use their pitches.
The women continued playing outside the official structures.
They organised matches, formed teams and kept alive a sport that the institution responsible for governing it had chosen to exclude. The ban was not lifted until 1970. Even then, the DFB took another twelve years to create a national team.
The first official match came against Switzerland in Koblenz on 10 November 1982.
West Germany won 5-1. Silvia Neid, then 18, came on during the match and scored twice. That day began a career that would make her a central figure in every great era of the national team: first as a player, then as an assistant coach and finally as head coach.
Victory in that opening match did not immediately turn Germany into a major power.
They failed to qualify for the European Championships in 1984 and 1987. They needed time to build a team, find a generation and stop competing like newcomers. The breakthrough came in 1989, when West Germany hosted the final tournament of the European Championship.
The semi-final against Italy was the first women’s football match broadcast live on German television. It ended in a penalty shootout in which goalkeeper Marion Isbert saved three spot kicks and converted the decisive one herself. In the final, played before a packed crowd in Osnabrück, Germany defeated Norway 4-1 and won the first title in their history.
The federation gave each champion a coffee set decorated with floral patterns.
The reward chosen by the DFB seemed to return them symbolically to the space they were supposedly never meant to have left. They had filled a stadium, won a European Championship and opened a new era for German football. The institution rewarded them with a household object.
That coffee set eventually became a museum piece.
The team, however, did not go back to the kitchen.
Two years later, Germany retained their European title. After losing it in 1993, they reclaimed it in 1995 and began a sequence that is difficult to imagine in modern football: six consecutive European Championships between 1995 and 2013.
For more than two decades, the European Championship almost always belonged to Germany.
The team won eight titles in their first twelve appearances, reached nine finals and recorded nineteen consecutive victories at final tournaments from 1997 through the 2009 final. From reclaiming the title in March 1995 until their quarter-final elimination in 2017, Germany spent 8,162 days as the reigning European champions.
Their players stopped representing an anomaly tolerated by the federation and became one of its greatest sources of prestige.
Silvia Neid, Heidi Mohr, Bettina Wiegmann, Steffi Jones, Nadine Angerer, Renate Lingor and Birgit Prinz were among the figures who sustained that transformation. Prinz won five European Championships and two World Cups, was named the world’s best player three times and became the defining face of Germany’s most dominant era.
The decisive step came in 2003.
Germany defeated Sweden in the World Cup final with a golden goal from Nia Künzer. The victory made Germany the first country to have won both the men’s and women’s World Cups. Four years later, they retained the title in China, defeated Brazil 2-0 in the final and completed the entire tournament without conceding a goal.
They were no longer merely the dominant force in Europe.
They had also become back-to-back world champions.
Olympic gold at Rio 2016 completed the collection. Silvia Neid, who had been involved in all eight of Germany’s European titles — three as a player, three as an assistant and two as head coach — ended her career by lifting at the Maracanã the only major trophy the team had still been missing.
The dominance, however, could not last forever.
Germany lost the Euro 2022 final to England and were eliminated in the group stage of the 2023 World Cup, something that had never happened before. The setback ended any belief that history alone guaranteed their place among the best.
The response began with an Olympic bronze medal in 2024 and continued at Euro 2025. Germany reached the semi-finals after surviving with ten players for much of their quarter-final against France, before losing to Spain only in extra time. They had not restored their empire, but they had recovered their ability to compete when a tournament turned against them.
Now, under Christian Wück, they have already secured their place at Brazil 2027.
Germany qualified before any other European nation, completing an unbeaten campaign in which they conceded only once in six matches. The objective is no longer to protect an inherited superiority, but to prove that Germany can conquer the world again in a far more competitive era, with Spain, England, the United States, Brazil and other powers capable of challenging them in any tournament.
The men’s national team leave the World Cup after losing a penalty shootout in the competition for the first time.
The women are already thinking about the next one.
Not because their history has been an inevitable succession of victories, but because they learned to survive almost everything: a ban, the condescension of their own federation, a coffee set as a reward, the end of a dynasty and the first group-stage elimination in their World Cup history.
The DFB took twelve years to create a women’s national team after lifting its ban on women’s football.
When it finally did, they needed thirty-four years to conquer Europe and the world, and to win Olympic gold.
