Werder Bremen Women

Bremen is a river city and a men's-club city first, so when Werder decided to rebuild a women's side in 2007, it was starting from what was already gone: a team that had reached the German Championship in the early 1970s and then simply stopped existing. The new department wore the same green and white, answered to the same nicknames as the men's team.

Promotion to the top-flight Frauen-Bundesliga did not come on merit alone. Werder finished second in the second division in 2015, and only moved up because the team above them could not obtain a league licence. They have stayed in the top flight since, without ever lifting the title.

Cindy König is the name attached to the club's scoring record, 75 league goals, the kind of tally that outlasts the seasons around it. Marie-Louise Eta wore the captain's armband before moving into coaching, work that eventually took her to the sidelines of a men's top-division side on an interim basis, a step no woman had made before her in Europe's five biggest leagues.

The clearest measure of how far the women's game in Bremen has travelled is what happens against Hamburg. The Nordderby has pulled crowds that no other fixture in German women's football matches: 57,000 for a cup semi-final and 37,000 for a league game, both in 2025. That same year Werder went further than they ever had domestically, reaching the DFB-Pokal final, where Bayern Munich beat them 4–2 in Cologne.