Carl Zeiss Jena Women

The team that plays those fixtures now was set up in 2017 as the women's department of FC Carl Zeiss Jena, but almost everything behind it belongs to FF USV Jena, founded in April 2003 and folded into the men's club on 1 July 2020, players and playing rights together. That merger is why a department only a few years old can point to the last DDR-Oberliga title, won in 1991 before German women's football was reorganised around a single league.

Genoveva Añonma scored 54 goals in Jena, more than anyone else has managed here, and she was on the books when the club came closest to something national: the DFB-Pokal final in 2010, lost. Since then the honours have come from the division below — 2. Frauen-Bundesliga South in 2008, 2. Frauen-Bundesliga North in 2021.

Home is the Ernst-Abbe-Sportfeld, shared with the men and capable of holding 15,432, a figure the women's side has never come near needing. Blue and white, and the Zeiss-Elf name that travels with everything the club puts on a pitch.

What Jena has not done is win anything at the top level. The promotions are real and the 1991 title is real, but the trophy cabinet holds no Bundesliga title and no cup — only the 2010 final, and the memory of getting that far.