Union Berlin hires Eta

Union Berlin have put Marie-Louise Eta in charge of their men’s team for the rest of the season, making her the first woman to lead a Bundesliga side. (bundesliga.com) The club made the change after firing Steffen Baumgart late on April 12, one day after a 3-1 loss at Heidenheim. Union said Eta will serve on an interim basis through the end of the 2025-26 campaign. (thestar.com.my) Union’s men were 11th in the table when Baumgart was dismissed, but the cushion was thin: seven points above the relegation playoff place with five matches left. The club said it had won only two of 14 league games since the winter break. (skysports.com) Eta, 34, was already set to become Union’s women’s head coach this summer after the club announced that move on April 3. Horst Heldt, Union’s director of men’s professional football, said she agreed to take the men’s job on an interim basis before that planned switch. (fc-union-berlin.de) (foxsports.com) The appointment lands in a league where Eta had already broken one barrier. In the 2023-24 season, she became the first female assistant coach to work a Bundesliga match with Union’s men. (bundesliga.com) Her path through the club has been unusually direct. Union said she arrived in 2023 as assistant coach of the men’s under-19 team, joined the first-team staff during a relegation fight, and this season led the under-19s to an unbeaten league title in the German Football Association youth league. (fc-union-berlin.de) Before Union, Eta retired from playing in 2018 at age 26 and moved straight into coaching, starting with Werder Bremen’s under-15 boys and later working with Germany’s women’s youth national teams. As a player, she won the UEFA Women’s Champions League with Turbine Potsdam in 2010. (bundesliga.com) Some coverage has framed the move even more broadly than Germany. NBC News and other outlets said Eta is the first woman to take charge of a men’s team in Europe’s five biggest domestic leagues: England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France. (nbcnews.com) Eta said Union’s place in the Bundesliga is “not yet guaranteed,” and that the immediate task is to get the points needed to stay up. For now, the history and the survival fight arrive together. (foxsports.com)