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Women's football on the up and up

The number of registered female players in Switzerland has grown considerably in the past 20 years - while the performances of Swiss national women's teams have also contributed greatly to the success story.

The women's game is flourishing in Switzerland
The women's game is flourishing in Switzerland ©SFV-ASF

Since the girls’ football training centre opened its doors in Huttwil in 2004, moving to Biel/Bienne in 2013, girls’ and women’s football in Switzerland has been flourishing. The number of registered female players has multiplied in the past 20 years, with more than 26,000 women and girls playing in clubs today.

The rise in the number of players is just one side of the success story. The performances and results of the leading players and national teams in all age categories are also impressive.

The women’s Under-17 and Under-19 teams qualify for the European championships almost as a matter of course, in 2010 the Under-19s qualified for the U-20 Women’s World Cup for the first time, and in 2015 the Under-17s reached the final of the European Women’s Under-17 Championship in Iceland, while the senior team played in their first Women’s World Cup in 2015 and have qualified for UEFA Women’s EURO 2017 in the Netherlands. Like their male counterparts, most of the players in the senior women’s national team are making names for themselves playing for clubs outside Switzerland.

This success story is no accident but the result of serious hard work which begins at the youngest age. In order to give them the best possible football training, talented girls train with the best boys for as long as possible. The development of elite girls’ football depends on this co-education. In order for it to work, girls have to join boys in the same children’s age group in order to then be able to make the move into the corresponding FooTeCo category.

FooTeCo – which stands for football, technical and coordination – is the Swiss FA’s talent development programme for U12s to U14s. When they reach the point when they can no longer keep up physically with the boys in their own age group, the girls have the possibility to continue in the FooTeCo programme for a further year in a younger age group. After that, the most promising ones make the transition into elite girls’ football.

Many of the current cohort of senior women’s national team players have successfully taken this route to the top and many of the national youth team players started out in the same way. By all accounts, women’s football in Switzerland has an exciting future ahead of it!

This article originally appeared in UEFA Direct No165

 

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