A historic moment awaits for football in the Netherlands on Monday, as the country’s national governing body, the KNVB, puts a highly consequential vote to its members on whether to grant an independent women’s club a licence to compete in the Eredivisie for the first time.
For the three women who have co-founded the new club hoping to “change the system”, the irony is not lost on them that everyone voting in this crucial ballot is a man. Yet they have high hopes that their dream is going to become a reality. If they get the yes vote they crave, their new club Hera United, based in Amsterdam, will play in the country’s top division next season and stage matches in the city’s historic Olympic Stadium.
It was in Amsterdam at the end of the 2022-23 campaign, when Ajax had won the women’s title, that Hera United’s co-founder and co-owner Marieke Visser, an author of children’s books and a columnist who previously founded a communications agency aiming to close the gender gap, concluded that an independent women’s club was the only way to truly advance the game for girls.
“Ajax Women didn’t get a celebration in the square in Amsterdam that is tradition for the men,” she recalls. “That was my vivid moment when I was thinking ‘if not now, then when are we going to get equal opportunities? How long do we have to keep begging for recognition? As long as the women are part of the men’s club, the focus will always be on the men – so what if we started our own club?”
Visser, who says her books focused on strong female role models because she believes you can’t be what you can’t see, was further inspired by the rapid rise of the Los Angeles-based women’s club Angel City, who were recently valued at around $250m (£196m), and she soon found women with the same vision to partner with. Fellow co-founder and co-owner Barbara Barend, a trailblazing sports journalist and presenter in the Netherlands, is no stranger to highlighting inequality.
“I noticed when my daughter started playing football that it was a big difference when my boy became a member of the club than when my daughter became a member of the club. The balls, the fields, the trainers were all less good, all these inequalities. I saw how difficult it was going to be for the status quo to change – but I have never accepted a ‘no’ in my life,” Barend says.
“There was a time when women had to go with their husbands to open a bank account. Men used to say women would never be able to vote [in elections]. In the Netherlands football is our No 1 sport and it’s still unequal. The KNVB said ‘you cannot change the system’ and we said ‘yes we can’. We’ll show that if you can give a plant a bit of water, it will grow.”
The group have already attracted several investors from the Netherlands and have agreed – if Monday’s vote goes their way – to take over the licence of the team that finished 11th in the women’s top tier last season, Telstar. The former Netherlands, Houston Dash and Republic of Ireland head coach, Vera Pauw, has been hired as a technical advisor. And they intend to give opportunities to young players from the Amsterdam area with a huge youth academy. But rather than just winning on the pitch, they intend to show their business can be successful too. The co-founder and co-owner Susan van Geenen, who has extensive business experience and has worked for companies such as Disney and the entertainment network Fox, explains the commercial potential of a club being run by women, for women.
“It’s the right time because there is traction in the market,” Van Geenen says. “Women’s football is taking off in multiple dimensions. We believe if you put the right money and dedication into the talent, it will sky rocket. You have to have partners – we need to have wing-women and wing-men – to elevate this. Yes, it’s risky money and, yes, the Netherlands is small, but the opportunity in the Netherlands offers a lot to gain. It’s a small test market. [The streaming platform] Disney+ was tested in the Netherlands because we are a nice test market. We are the ideal market to test the women’s football case and we have massive potential because we love football. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”
If they get the go-ahead, Barend says this new club will tailor everything specifically towards women and female athletes’ performance, adding: “We won’t have a coach who thinks ‘OK, first I can coach Hera and then I can go into the men’s game’. No, we’ll have someone specialised in women’s football. Our medical staff will specialise in women’s football. Our training, injury-prevention, marketing, the sales team, our brands, everything will be done from the perspective of a woman. That’s going to make the biggest difference.”
The trio are promising to run their club like an open book to help rival teams learn, hoping others will follow their model. They want to collaborate with women around the world. In short, their vision is one that could excite millions of girls.
But first, they need men to grant them permission on Monday.
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