Compared to the proportion of the population, there are very few women footballers with a migration background. The DFB sees “huge potential” there, but coaches like Tugba Tekkal are needed.
In interviews, Sara Doorsoun usually declines on this sensitive topic. As the daughter of an Iranian father and a Turkish mother, did she once have a hard time playing soccer, her great passion?
No, not herself. The Vice European Champion – one of currently only two German national players with a migration background – prefers to refer to her friend Tugba Tekkal. The 37-year-old of Kurdish-Yazidi descent is training again this afternoon on a sports field in Cologne with some girls, some of whose names and faces should preferably not appear in public. Because otherwise they could get in trouble at home.
However, Tekkal, whose first name Tugba is pronounced tuba and who can confidently be described as a human rights activist, can almost always clear that up at some point. Like the 16-year-old from Iraq, who has been playing with the Scoring Girls for six years now. “I enjoy football more than anything else,” she says before walking onto the pitch. “And you can talk to Tugba about anything.”
Tekkal once marched into her family’s refugee hostel and convinced her parents that their daughter could play soccer. Today, the girl also plays in a normal club, with her father and mother often watching with pride. “When I didn’t feel like going to training, my mother forced me,” says the 16-year-old and laughs.
Played soccer at home
Tekkal secretly had to play soccer until she was 16. Nevertheless, she made it to the Bundesliga player at Hamburger SV and 1. FC Köln. Her parents come from eastern Turkey and were persecuted as Kurds and part of the Yezidi religious community. Tekkal was born and raised in Hanover, with nine siblings and “in bondage”, as she says herself. In her early 20s she went to Hamburg. “Unmarried,” she says with sparkling eyes and a broad grin, brushing her shiny black curls off her face, “of course that was a huge topic in the family.” But she has no grudges against her parents: “Education was important to them, but they would never have thought of sports clubs.”
Tugba Tekkal founded Hawar.help with her sisters in 2015 to draw attention to the genocide of the Yazidis. “On the ashes of a genocide,” as she says. Düzen Tekkal is the chair of the human rights organization. The Yazidis are an ethnic-religious minority in northern Iraq and Syria and in southeastern Turkey, who have been persecuted by the Islamic State terrorist militia for years – as in the attack on the Sinjar region in 2014.
To this day, many survivors live in camps in the Kurdish north of Iraq. Hawar.help, awarded the Julius Hirsch Prize by the German Football Association in 2020, is also active there with the girls’ and women’s football project Scoring Girls. Tekkal hears sayings like: “You spoil our daughters for us.”
Eight locations in total
Two locations in Iraq, three in Cologne, four in Berlin. A total of over 250 kickers from around 15 nations, between ten and 30 years old. “Girls who didn’t have the opportunity to play football in their countries of origin or who were forbidden to do so,” explains Tekkal. “And who felt they were doing something wrong when they did it. Or felt like they were betraying their parents.” The offer is also aimed at girls who were born in Germany and “nevertheless have the feeling that they don’t belong”.
But it’s much more than playing football: help with homework, finding an apprenticeship and dealing with authorities. And Tekkal and her colleagues try to bring the girls together with role models from all walks of life. With self-confident and self-determined women with an immigrant background or well-known ones like EM star Lena Oberdorf, who was already with the Scoring Girls in Berlin. In Cologne there is also a sponsorship with the Bundesliga women of 1. FC Köln.
Above all, Tekkal wants to take the parents with them to their project. “They often tell us their girls can only play football if they play for you. Because they know, for example, that we only have female coaches. They trust us because we’ve had a lot of conversations with them because we speak their language.”
DFB: “Huge potential”
The DFB has been trying for a long time to recruit young females with a migration background, for example in the Kicking Girls integration project. In families with traditional structures, there are often still many reservations about letting girls play soccer, says Vice President Sabine Mammitzsch. Especially if they play with boys at a young age. There was also pressure from relatives and friends. “Of course there’s huge potential. But we just don’t have the people to support these young athletes. Especially the trainers.”
Such as Tugbar Tekkal, who works for the GermanDream educational initiative. “The biggest fear parents have is uprooting,” she says. “It’s very important that they are told that integration is not a one-way street. And that they open doors for their daughters like they do for their sons.”
Ethnic minorities are hardly represented
So far, only a few players with a migration background have made it to the top in football, in the Bundesliga or even in the national team. It’s no different in the country of the European champions: when England’s women triumphed at the home European Championship in July, this debate arose there. In contrast to the selection of men, ethnic minorities are hardly represented. You only see “blonde ponytails”, wrote the newspaper “The Times”.
Sara Doorsoun, Eintracht Frankfurt defender, says she was “brought up very Western”. It was never an issue that she wasn’t allowed to play football. “I’m also very grateful for that, because I know that there are still many girls who have to fight for it,” she once said in an interview with the “Frankfurter Rundschau”.
During the European Championship game between Germany and Finland, Tekkal sat with three girls from the Scoring Girls in the Milton Keynes stadium. When Doorsoun’s clubmate Nicole Anyomi, who has a father from Togo and a mother from Ghana, came on, one of the girls brought tears to his eyes, says Tekkal. When Anyomi then scored the 3-0, her protégé’s composure was completely gone. Why is she crying? “Because she looks like me,” said the girl. “Then I could do it too.”