Did you follow the Women’s World Cup, with two European teams in the semi-finals?
I saw a beautiful game, Germany against France. Unfortunately, and I am speaking as a Frenchman here, we lost against Germany. We didn’t deserve to lose, but it was a beautiful game. Women’s football is increasing greatly in quality, and we at UEFA are continuing our development work with it.
The problem of women’s football is that there is not a financial context like there is in the men’s game. The women would like to have the same competitions as the men, but there is not the same money.
This is why we have to go slowly with the development of the competitions, not only the development of the women’s game.
For some years, I have said: ‘Don’t ask me to bring professional players in, because you do not have the money to pay’ – unless we work through the professional clubs.
You could have clubs for example from the Premier League, Serie A or La Liga with a women’s team, and they could give for example 10 percent of the budget to the development of the women’s teams. That could be easier, but I am not sure that this will work everywhere.
Is it possible to bring full-time professionalism into women’s football?
Professionalism is because of the money – not only because they want to be professional. The difficulty is that for UEFA, it is a matter for the national associations, the leagues, the clubs. It’s more a national topic than international.
In Germany, the Women’s World Cup drew more TV spectators than the U21 EURO. Did that surprise you?
No. They love women’s football in Germany.
As for the under-21 competition, there are some decisions to be taken in the future about what could happen with the competition, because it’s not a youth tournament when you are 21 years of age – and, by the time of the finals, players are 23 years old when they play.
It’s an “in-between” competition. Some players are 23 years of age – but I had won 20 caps for the French national team by the time that I was 23.
What happened a long time ago was that the education of players was undertaken by the national associations – so we created competitions to develop the players.
However, back then, at 17 or 18, they had not been in a professional club at 12 or 13, as they are now.
That means that the development of young players today is very different. Now, when they are 18, it’s almost as if they have been professional players for six years. When I was 18, I had just arrived in the professional league.
That means that a big change has taken place – so, for me, these competitions such as the Under- 21 [championship] are a little bit strange today. A long time ago, it was OK to use this sort of competition to develop the players – but, nowadays, players at 23 are developed, because they began working at Barcelona, or Chelsea or Bayern at the age of 12. It is an issue for reflection.
