Women of the 1st FC Nürnberg: climb and stay in the 1st league

At the end of the conversation, Joti Chatzialexiou turns and indicates the railing of the swimming pool by sitting in. It is up there, says the sports director of 1. FC Nürnberg. Chatzialexiou smiles and points to the lettering: “Think Big” can be read there, behind it a star, also the symbolic. The star of the Nuremberg women’s team has not yet worked, otherwise Chatzialexiou would hardly sit on a green armchair in a swimming pool. But he has set himself the task of tackling the matter now. Hence the lettering, hence the armchair – and therefore the swimming pool.

It is Monday evening and a fairly unusual setting in which Chatzialexiou does what he also does day out day out: he talks about football. But this time it’s not about Miroslav Klose and his team. Chatzialexiou is also not in his office in the office or on the podium in the media room, which is only a throw -away from the training places. This time Chatzialexiou talks about the FCN women’s team-and the swimming pool in which it is now sitting, serves the hotel on the Nuremberg training area as a conference room. “We want to climb. We want to go to the first division – and we want to stay there too, ”says Chatzialexiou.

The club women are currently leading the table of the 2nd Bundesliga. With Union Berlin, a promoted team, they are running a race for the championship. Because the Bundesliga is increased by two teams for the new season, the first three rise anyway – and this should also include the Nuremberg women if they should lose the duel with Union at the end. In the almost forty years of their history, the club women played twice in the Bundesliga, but both times, 1999/2000 and 2023/24, they were second-class after only one year. Now the FCN wants to come to stay. But this requires economic support.

That evening, the club invited potential sponsors to the hotel on its training grounds and overwritten the corresponding leaflet with “Future Women’s Football”. Nothing less than that is now possible. The 1. FC Nürnberg has a radiance that extends beyond Franconia – but so far he has not really shone women’s football. At home, the Nuremberg rarely play in front of more than 500 fans. Chatzialexiou says that they deserved significantly more attention and recognition.

How do you make a second division club attractive in women’s football if you can’t score with the name Klose?

That is why the sports director now wants to offer women’s football a stage. And this stage is the swimming pool by sitting alongside Nia Künzer and Florian Wittmann. Künzer directs the national team as sports director, Wittmann is entrusted with the strategic orientation at the association. They also emphasize the great progress of women’s football in recent years. In professionalization, there is “only a little room for improvement,” says Künzer, while Wittmann predicts: “With the spirit you will establish yourself in the first league.”

FCN jerseys, white, red, blacks hang behind Chatzialexiou, Künzer and Wittmann. In addition to an entry -level staircase that leads down into the pool, a shirt is attached to the 11. It is the number with which a certain Miroslav Klose has shaped the men’s national team for more than ten years-and now trains the professional department of FCN men. But on the jersey next to the stairs there is not “Klose”, but “Meroni”.

And that is also what the evening is about: How do you make a second division club attractive in women’s football if you can’t score with the name Klose?

Before Chatzialexiou came to Nuremberg last summer, he was also responsible for the women’s national team as a sporting director at the DFB. Now he still says “my girls” when he talks about the players of national coach Christian Wück. It is “a matter close to the heart” for him to advance women’s football in Nuremberg, explains Chatzialexiou. He suspects that he will need staying breath, but the sports director has nevertheless decided to tackle it.

Chatzialexiou no longer has to do basic work because the club women use the structures of men. However, it reveals that it is necessary to put the FCN in a shop window that evening, how far the team remains under the radar. “It’s about development,” says Chatzialexiou and then speaks of working together, using synergies and wanting to expand the circle of sponsors. All of this begins to understand football as football- and not to subordinate the men’s team to the men’s team, says Chatzialexiou and then looks back from the swimming pool. Horst Hrubesch leans on the parapet at the top. In the meantime, the former national coach of the women’s national team is a young manager at Hamburger SV, but he is also connected to the women’s team in his heart’s club.

He met Hrubesch before the event, reveals Chatzialexiou below on his armchair. Hrubesch had told him that Nuremberg rose anyway and could leave the points to the HSV in early May, if the points occur at the Valznerweiher. Chatzialexiou laughs. Of course, the club will not do that – not even if the climb should actually be determined. It could well be that the Nuremberg women have already sealed the Bundesliga return in early May, but still need points in the championship race with Union Berlin. And then you have no gifts against the HSV. At the Valznerweiher, women’s football is now valid: Think Big.