Can women manage men football teams?

OK, there is no doubt that football is a man’s world and there is very little place within that world for women. It is sad, but that is how it is. Football is one of the last truly sexist areas of our society in 2009. Women’s football is getting bigger, but other than in America, it still fails to really take off.

So against that backdrop, I wonder how we all feel about women managers?

Successful

Many people say that only men who have played the game at the highest level can go on to be successful managers. I think Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho, for example, may beg to differ. So if you don’t have to have played the game at the highest level to be a manager, what is there to say you have to be a man?

I would like to introduce twenty-seven year old Donna Powell. She is a turnstile operator at Conference South club Fisher Athletic in London. Conference South is a semi-professional league which sits at tier six in the English game.

Struggling

Fisher Athletic, like most lower league and non-league clubs, are struggling financially. Donna managed to raise £500 for the club and her prize was to take over from team manager Dave Mehmet for one game. That game came on Wednesday evening when Fisher Athletic entertained high flying Eastleigh who were sitting third in the league.

Fisher went into the game second from the bottom of the league, fourteen points from safety and on a run of eleven straight defeats. Could Donna, who coaches an under 11’s football team, work a miracle?

Feared

As it turned out, she couldn’t. However, she came closer than many would have expected. Fisher went down 2-1 to Eastleigh who have suffered just two defeats in their last thirteen games. With the score 2-0 to Eastleigh at half-time, the Fisher fans feared the worst for the second half, but some words of wisdom from Donna seemed to transform the team who put in a credible second half performance.

Chairman Martin Eede hailed the second-half performance under Powell as one of the side’s best of the season. He wrote on the club’s website,

“I was delighted by the players’ response in the second half. I feared for us at half-time and thought it was only a matter of time before Eastleigh ran away with it but the team’s response was fantastic and they put in one of our best performances of the season after half-time.”

The Fish were 2-0 down against promotion-chasing Eastleigh at half-time but pulled one back through a 25-yard free-kick from American John Raus to ensure a tense finish.

Donna made a tactical change at half-time when she switched from Fisher’s usual 3-5-2 formation to 4-4-2 at the interval.

After the game she told the BBC,

“I enjoyed it very much and the boys played really well – they battled hard and obviously Eastleigh are third in the league. I just congratulate them for getting a goal back and not losing big scores. They lost 2-1, but well done to them. It was a bit tougher than what I expected but it was good. It was tougher from the fans more than anything else. They were shouting ‘stay in the kitchen’, but I’ve never been in a kitchen and I’ll never go into a kitchen.”

Donna went on to say she is “desperate” for a career in football and is already taking her coaching badges.

“I’d love to be offered a role on the coaching staff on a more permanent basis. I believe I’ve got the talent to succeed,” she said.

Whilst Donna was happy, her chairman was happy and all things considered, the fans and players were probably pretty happy, not everyone embraced the idea. The Director of Football at Eastleigh, David Malone, said that the appointment of Donna ‘devalued the league’.

He said,

“I’m not particularly happy about it, simply because we’ve got to concentrate our minds on getting three points from the game. I think what they’ve done is unprofessional. Fisher have done it for financial reasons, and I can partly understand that, but I don’t think being manager of a Blue Square South team is a saleable commodity. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man – which I probably do – but at this stage of the season we’re working extremely hard to get our side up into the Blue Square Premier, and I think the whole thing is just badly timed.”

Malone is right. He does sound like a grumpy old man!

What do you think then? Is there any reason why other women can’t follow Donna Powell’s lead and start to get into the coaching and managerial side of the men’s game?