It has just not won as much as Wolfsburg.Īnd yet, somehow, the success of Popp and her teammates has still been overshadowed by the rise of Bayern. Bayern has picked up three Bundesliga titles since 2015. It is the club’s calling card, an inevitability threaded into its DNA. That is what Bayern does, after all: It wins. A few weeks ago, Popp herself suggested that Bayern Munich - Wolfsburg’s only serious rival for the German title - had started the season as “strong favorites, and that has been the case for the last couple of years.”Īs soon as Bayern started to invest heavily in its women’s side, as it did around a decade ago, the natural assumption was that it would win. And yet even its players seem to have internalized the idea that they are underdogs. Its squad drips with experience and talent: Alexandra Popp, the German talisman, and her international teammates Svenja Huth, Merle Frohms and Marina Hegering Lena Oberdorf, arguably Europe’s most exciting young player the seasoned Dutch international Jill Roord, restored to Germany after a couple of years away in England.īy any measure, Wolfsburg is a bona fide superpower, a dominant force domestically and a longstanding contender internationally. It has made five finals, and won two of them. It has reached at least the quarterfinals of the Women’s Champions League in every year of the competition’s existence. This is a club that has been crowned champion of Germany in five of the last six seasons. The grounds for VfL Wolfsburg’s inferiority complex are thin, at best.
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