At the start of the European Championship women’s football, Human will broadcast the four-part documentary On the way to the top from. An ambitious, in-depth and sometimes moving story by documentary maker Mildred Roethof about the long struggle of girls and women for equal treatment in sport, which has been ruled by men since the year zero.
The sport, at least in a competitive context, was prohibited for women in the Netherlands until 1971, ostensibly for physical reasons. A sport that is still characterized by the deprivation of women, underestimation and the thwarting of their ambitions. This is the reason why many top talent shines at top foreign clubs, which previously faced the unstoppable advance of women’s football.
In four times fifty minutes, Roethof describes the emancipation struggle – it is a struggle – empathically and lightly. She does this on the basis of candid interviews and portraits. With prominent figures and (former) Orange Lionesses: ex-player and manager of women’s football at Ajax Daphne Koster, footballers Merel van Dongen (Atlético Madrid) and Sherida Spitse (Ajax), ex-footballer and TV analyst Leonne Stentler, ex-national coach Sarina Wiegman – just to name a few. But also with young talents, girls like Bobbie Kind, who only dreams of two things: playing in ‘the first’ of Ajax and being selected for the national team.
Painful examples of their deprivation in the past and present abound. While top clubs have their young (male) talents transported daily by taxi from home to top sports school, to training and home, Bobbie has to take the tram. The boys receive the best trainers and nutritional advice, with the girls it is often the parents who pay for the peripheral issues.
Everywhere, girls with football talent are confronted with the closed men’s bastion. Boys build team spirit together in the locker room, their teammate changes in the referee’s cubicle. The Orange Lionesses played in loose clothing for a long time, which ‘didn’t look good’, according to early champion of the women’s cause, former KNVB director Michael van Praag: ‘They got the outfit from the men of the previous year’. Not so long ago, he asked the NOS to cover women’s competitions. The answer: ‘We’ll do it if they look as hot as the hockey ladies.’
Inequality is everywhere in football. It is therefore not surprising that the Ajax players did not dare to take any action against Marc – ‘Dickpic’ – Overmars, although stories about his transgressive behavior had been circulating for years. ‘Mister Ajax’ Sjaak Swart put the matter under the tablecloth in conversation with Roethof: ‘Everything will be all right at Ajax in the end.’ It didn’t stop Daphne Koster from opening up about the culture of fear when she played football at Ajax: ‘As a woman, you were constantly afraid of not being accepted. And you constantly wondered whether what you say has no consequences.’
To get discouraged? Not the heroines in Roethof’s wonderful documentary. Let it slide.