50 Years of Women’s Football in Switzerland

The Hidden History project has shown us how hard women have had to fight for equality in English Football. But this was also the case in countries across the world where prejudice stood in the way of the women’s game. This week we hand over to Saro Pepe Fischer from the Football Club Zurich Museum, to find out about the hidden history of women’s football in Switzerland.

Objects from FCZ-Museum

Saro Pepe Fischer has been director of the museum and archive of Football Club Zurich since 2011. The FCZ-Museum runs the blog http://www.seit1968.ch (since 1968) and has started a new collection on the history of Swiss Women’s Football. A large exhibition is planned on the topic for 2020.

1968 marks a turning point in the history of Swiss Football. It was the year in which football finally became accessible to everyone. On 21st February of that year, Switzerland’s first women’s football club was founded under the name of Damen Fussball Club Zürich.

Damen Fussball Club Zurich 1970

The history of the female football movement in Switzerland is barely documented. Now, the Blog-project seit1968.ch (since 1968) wants to change this and has started a new collection of pictures, objects and stories about the inclusion of women in the country’s most popular sport. It is an initiative that draws attention to a long forgotten subject and tries to preserve a piece of intangible cultural heritage. Most of the relevant material is found in the private collections of players and officials. It needs to be saved and gathered into a proper archive now, before it gets lost forever.

To become an active member of a football club was not possible for girls and women until the late 1960s, but throughout Switzerland, informal teams had emerged and been involved in local town tournaments. The most famous women’s team was FC Goitschel, which played many successful tournaments in the district of Aargau. In 1965 a spectacular case occurred in Sion, when 12-year-old Madeleine Boll was issued an international player pass by mistake. She was allowed to play with the boys until the Swiss Football Association noticed the mistake and withdrew the her license.

1968 image of women’s football in Switzerland

In 1966, the Football Association voted against the inclusion of FC Goitschel, but offered the players referee training. So, bit by bit, the young women pushed into the men’s game. The first game with 11 instead of 6 players (as in tournaments) took place in spring 1967 in the town of Wohlen: Goitschel won 6-0 against a mixed Zurich team. From this Zurich team, on 28th February 1968, the ‘Damen Fussball Club Zurich‘ (DFCZ) was founded, as the first official Swiss women‘s football club. The founders were two sisters Ursula and Trudy Moser, as well as their father Franz. The documents from the early days are stored today in the archive of FC Zurich.

Statute DFC Zurich 1968

The founding of the DFC Zurich was the trigger for the first major media reports on women’s football. The reactions ranged from astonishment to amusement: ‘Football Amazons get serious,‘ the newspaper Sport headlined on April 3rd, 1968. The Tribune des Sports titled their article on 1st July 1968 with ‘Zurich has also a football team … of charm!‘ Often the early press releases focus on the looks of the players: ‘There are very pretty and pretty ones, taller and smaller ones, young and old ones, lean and full figured, black and blonde ones.‘ (Sport, 04.03.1968)

Medals from the Swiss League Cup in the FCZ Museum

What role did the general social upheaval of 1968 play in the inclusion of women in the most popular Swiss sport? A final answer to this question is difficult to find. In interviews, former pioneers explicitly deny a direct connection between the women’s equality movement and the new achievements in sports. Nevertheless, both current contemporary research as well as media reports from the 1960s/70s draw parallels: often the young female footballers are shown as pioneers of equality in their own specific field of sport.

Official league trophy 1970s

The period from 1968 to 1971 can be described as the early history of organised Swiss women’s football. Independent associations were formed throughout the country, which merged on 24th April 1970 in the Swiss Women’s Football League (SDFL). Only a year later though, a revision of the Association said that from the season 1971/72 onwards, only teams that were attached to a regular men’s football club could play. This led to the disappearance of some pioneer clubs and to start-ups of women’s teams in existing clubs. The SDFL itself existed as a separate League until 1993, when it was fully integrated into the regular Swiss Football Association.

Twenty-five years later, in 2018, women’s football in Switzerland has definitely outgrown its infancy. There are now more than 24,000 active players in 400 clubs, and the national team regularly take part in major FIFA and UEFA tournaments (2015 and 2017) with young talents taking the leap into foreign professional leagues.