Home is indeed where the heart is. On Friday Sabrina Wittmann signed a new deal to stay at FC Ingolstadt, continuing a partnership whose roots go back nearly two decades but which became of wider public interest when the third-tier club appointed her as the first female coach of a German professional football team in summer 2024.
There is no tokenism in the club’s choice, underlined not only by the contract extension but by the 34-year-old’s recent completion of her coaching pro licence, awarded to her just over a month ago. “I’ll always be the first woman in Germany coaching a professional men’s team,” Wittmann says, “but I want to be seen as a coach.
“It’s OK to be the first woman, I’m really proud of it, but in the end I want to be a good coach, I want to be a good manager, I want to be a good human being towards my players. It’s about how you want to be seen, not just about being the first.”
Wittmann is not unhappy to be a pioneer and recognises the power of her presence in the game but is convinced that the real power is to be perceived on equal terms to her male counterparts. This is why extending the adventure with Ingolstadt – “where I know every single employee” – makes perfect sense.
The club are well aware of the importance of Wittmann’s trailblazing but to them she is just Sabrina, with – as the managing director, Dieter Beiersdorfer, put it in the statement that announced the new contract – “her many years of experience at FC Ingolstadt 04 [having] instilled in her an exceptional sense of identification with and responsibility for our club”. Continuing to work with Wittmann is an endorsement of her qualities rather than a matter of principle.
Born in Ingolstadt, 50 miles north of Munich, in 1991, she took her first steps in football there as a teenager, after being encouraged by Miroslav Klose to join a club when the then Werder Bremen and Germany striker saw her play while she was on holiday with her parents in Calabria in 2005.
A move to the United States followed at 16, where Wittmann played high school soccer in Kentucky while acting as assistant coach for a middle school team. By 2009 she was coaching in the Ingolstadt academy – while still playing – and then coached the club’s under-19s in the Bundesliga before landing the first-team job, initially on an interim basis.
Even with her spell in the top job coming up to the two-year mark, it has taken time to adjust, for coach and club alike. “Ingolstadt is not the centre of Germany, to be honest,” Wittmann says, “especially in terms of football. When I started training there were so many cameras and media. That was something new in Ingolstadt so I recognised OK, that’s something special.
“I knew I opened the door a little for women and at the beginning I was honestly afraid of closing the door quicker than I would like to. But I told myself, and with the people around me who have my back: ’Let’s just do and not talk much about it’, and all the pressure that I felt at the beginning – you get used to it. I get asked a lot more questions about football now than I did at the beginning and that’s something I love.”
With that comes trying to pick up Ingolstadt after a rough couple of years. This was a Bundesliga club less than a decade ago under Ralph Hasenhüttl, who she got to know while studying for the pro licence. Yet “you can’t copy and paste”, Wittmann says. She wants to build something “different”, and sustainable.
“I am who I am,” she says, pointing out that not only her gender but also doing an apprenticeship at Audi and studying law has shaped her perspective. “Maybe sometimes I am softer than a man. But when I was with the under-19s, a father [of one of the players] told me that the strength of a woman was something I should not lose. So I just try to be authentic to who I am, not to make myself extra hard or anything.”
Wittmann is equally sanguine about the haters. “I’ve had negative stuff on social media and in stadiums but I try not to focus on that stuff because if it comes down to conversations, nine out of 10 are really positive and one is negative. The loudest [voices] are sometimes the most negative ones but I try to focus on the nine that are positive.”
Wittmann’s commitment to Ingolstadt doesn’t mean she isn’t fiercely ambitious, knowing that an eventual progression would mean she and the club had enjoyed real success. She is prepared to dig in like Germany’s coach, Julian Nagelsmann, whom she greatly admires, another young coach wrongly perceived as an overnight success.
“It took me almost 15 years to coach a professional team,” Wittmann says. “It’s not just about the knowledge that you add to yourself but about your own confidence. Be authentic, stick to it and be patient.”
Patience as the watchword is what would appear to make Wittmann and Ingolstadt the ideal match.
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