Player woman
Player's wife is a term for spouses or partners of mostly prominent male athletes from club teams, which is used in German-speaking countries primarily in connection with professional football .
In English, the term WAG is used as an acronym for W ives A nd G irlfriends, whereby the English word wag also stands for “wedeln”.
Origin of the term
As recently as 1974, the DFB wanted to refuse players women to participate in the banquet of world champions, women’s football itself, because this martial art was essentially foreign to women’s nature and was banned for decades.
The social and media interest in dealing with the wives and partners of athletes developed parallel to the success story of professional football. This already applied to Italia Walter , the wife of world champion Fritz Walter, who was both the first better-known manager as well as the player's wife addressed in the media. She can't cook with, she can't sew, she'll finish our Fritz , Sepp Herberger warned of her.
In the book In the next life I'll become a gamer's wife , the image of the gamer's wife drawn in the media is examined more closely. The title goes back to a well-known quote from Mehmet Scholl, the book itself to a relevant diploma thesis. Accordingly, the cliché has always been based on exceptions, the effects of which have proven to be particularly salable in the context of tabloid reporting. The ever broader reporting expected by the audience, which soon went beyond the sporting competitions and first extended to the training ground and then to the private life of the athletes as celebrities , included the family of the respective athletes in the sense of tabloid reporting .
This gave rise to the generalizing, categorizing term of the “player woman”, to which supposed general characteristics were soon assigned. Professional footballers often marry relatively early. The wives often see themselves unjustly reduced to the role of the man's appendage, on the other hand, their families and relationships are exposed to special strains due to frequent moves, celebrities and comparatively short sporting careers.
Christine Eisenbeis describes that the role as a player's wife can be an economically profitable "position", which - as in the case of Mats Hummels ' partner , Cathy Fischer's "player of the year 2013" - a professional career, in this case the Hiring as a reporter for the pay-TV broadcaster Sky . However, the price for such a career, namely serving the regularities of the cliché that Eisenbeis sees fulfilled in a statement by Fischer such as “I was already born a princess”, is too high for many players' women. They prefer to evade media attention as much as possible and refuse to be labeled as a player's wife, as this term would negate their respective realities of life and their right to individuality in advance.
Connotation of the term
Some players 'wives also made their husbands' careers their own by publicly appearing as managers of their spouses and negotiating contracts and changing clubs. In the 1980s and 1990s, player women like Angela Häßler, Gaby Schuster , Martina Effenberg and Bianca Illgner, who acted as managers of their spouses and negotiated contracts and club changes, had an image of player women as goal-oriented and career-conscious, asserting themselves in a purely male domain Working people shaped.
However, even then, her image in the tabloid media had rather negative and hostile connotations and was accordingly received with hostility. It was aggressively questioned whether women had lost anything in the football business. On the other hand, expressions like those of Pilar Brehme were eagerly taken up, who in the conservative daily newspaper Die Welt describes the "virtues of player women" with the necessity of "tolerance, self-confidence, attractiveness" up to the supposed "cardinal virtue", "conveying nest warmth" described. Bianca Illgner made use of the cliché to differentiate herself from it by accusing other gamblers women in a passage that was often quoted later in the partly autobiographical book Alles - Ein fiktiver Tatsachenroman with “mostly just hollow, but styled to the tips of their hair " to be.
In the past, as now, a special role was played by women who were celebrities themselves before their relationship with the relevant athletes (such as Lolita Morena or, as contemporary examples, Victoria Beckham , Sara Carbonero , Shakira , Ana Ivanović and Sylvie van der Vaart ). Soon, however, hitherto unknown women alongside prominent athletes came into the public eye. Victoria Beckham had already been prominent, among other things, she was insulted as the personified death of football. Coleen Rooney was arguably the first woman to make her career as a gamer woman.
After women had established themselves as self-employed professionals in West Germany, the image of the player's wife shifted to particularly attractive and fashion-conscious “pin-ups and appendages”. The media would have prepared for a corresponding, often sexually connoted reporting. In online appearances of leading newspapers and magazines, there would also be photo series of attractive player women in the sense of a voyeuristic display, as well as votes initiated by lifestyle magazines and tabloid media about the most attractive or “most popular” player woman. In England , the fictional TV series Footballers' Wives, produced by ITV in 2003 and broadcast for the first time on German television in 2008, shaped the image of a player's wife who does not earn or manage her husband's money, but spends it, is extremely consumer-oriented and with other athletes having sexual affairs. Although the series was often criticized as "primitive" and "borderline debilitating", it was able to record high audience numbers.
For the media, sexual affairs between player wives and teammates of their partners in particular are a topic of particular interest that goes far beyond the boulevard area. The extensive coverage of such incidents, such as the relationship between Stefan Effenberg and the then wife of Thomas Strunz in Germany or the affair between the former captain of the English national team, John Terry and Wayne Bridge's then partner, all contributed to a negative overall result Call the "player woman".
At times it was common for the players' wives to be presented with pictures in the kicker special before major events. This was shown as background information on the players. One of the most well-known media reprocessing was done by the singer Olli Schulz in his song of the same name "Player Woman". Here Schulz presents the negative stereotype of the player's wife as a decorative accessory on the one hand and a career-conscious, self-centered attachment to football professionals who have been handed over to them on the other. In this case, the career is the relationship with the player who, on the one hand, is built up but, in a crisis phase, is also "replaced" for another player.
literature
- Christine Eisenbeis: In my next life I'll be a player , Die Werkstatt Verlag, Göttingen 2012
- Gaby Papenburg , Anette Pilawa: Out of the offside trap: the football book for women; so that you can finally have a say! , Egmont Ehapa Verlag , Berlin 2006
- Andersen, Lila, and Greta Behrens. My Passions VIP: The player woman. neobooks Self-Publishing, 2013.
- Roth, Jürgen. Riddle football: interesting facts about systems, player women, Franz Beckenbauer and other dirty things. Klartext-Verlag, 1999.
Individual evidence
- ↑ https://dict.leo.org/englisch-deutsch/wag
- ↑ Gerd Müller - "Bomber of the Nation" wrote records for eternity. In: fifa.com. FIFA , accessed May 5, 2011 .
- ↑ Okka Gundel : You have to be eleven friends: Why women are so enthusiastic about football. Knaur eBook, 2011, ISBN 3-426-41032-X , S. 9. Restricted preview in the Google book search
- ↑ RP ONLINE: From Italia Walter to Lena Gercke: 'In my next life I'll be a player's wife'. In: RP ONLINE. Retrieved February 14, 2016 .
- ↑ A touch of showbiz: TV job for Hummel's girlfriend , Focus Online from August 2, 2013.
- ↑ The phenomenon of gamblers: A life with clichés , Ruhr Nachrichten, June 21, 2013.
- ↑ Illgners tell-all book: Inside Bianca , review in Spiegel Online April of 2005.
- ↑ " Players ' wives are making their own media careers today" , interview with Christine Eisenbein in the soccer magazine RUND , issue 307, September 2008.
- ↑ The phenomenon of gamblers: A life with clichés , Ruhr Nachrichten, June 21, 2013.
- ↑ 11 Friends : Eggs, we need eggs! , Heyne Hardcore , Munich 2010, p. 56.
- ↑ EM "Hymns" in the test: Olli Schulz - "player woman"