Germany’s new Player’s Pathway course offers a way to keep former professionals in football. The work of passing on what they know begins with learning how to teach.
A player can recognise a moment before finding the words to explain it: when to move, where pressure will come from, how a teammate needs help. Years in football accumulate in these decisions. Becoming a coach requires finding ways for somebody else to learn them.
That transition gives Germany’s new Player’s Pathway course an interest beyond its familiar names. In its 20 October announcement, the German Football Association said 20 former professionals, including Sami Khedira, Shkodran Mustafi and Nils Petersen, had begun the coaching course the previous day. The DFB presents the wider pathway, which also includes management education, as a means of keeping former players within football.
There is a personal opportunity here: another working life in a game that has occupied much of the first. There is also a shared interest. Football has invested years in developing these players. Their experience can continue to serve the game, provided they have opportunities to examine it, question it and make it useful to others.
Learning to explain
The DFB Academy curriculum includes reflection on the player’s identity, training methods and feedback. Those subjects suggest how much can change when somebody moves to the other side of a session.
A former player may remember what helped them improve. A coach has to work with people whose needs and understanding differ from their own. Demonstrating a movement, designing a practice and deciding when to intervene each require judgement. Personal experience supplies material for that work; education gives it room to be tested.
Germany is building on an established European approach. In 2021, UEFA described combined B and A courses for long-serving professionals, with examples from Italy and Belgium. Recognising an experienced player’s starting point can coexist with substantial further learning.
For clubs, the practical opportunity is to make that learning part of everyday football. A developing coach needs players to work with, colleagues who will discuss a session and enough responsibility to discover what still needs improvement.
A Japanese experience of learning again
Japan offers a useful account of that process through Yukari Kinga.
In a JFA interview published in January 2026, Kinga described pursuing coaching qualifications while still playing and gaining her A General licence in 2025. She found value in encountering other coaches’ approaches and receiving feedback during practical club work.
Her account makes the transition tangible. A long playing career had given her experience, while studying coaching exposed her to different ways of organising and communicating the game. The learning continued through conversation with people observing her work.
The institutional support can take different forms. The JFA’s 2026 course information describes practical learning and mentoring within its coaching education. It also published a women’s preparation workshop intended to strengthen coaching skills before an A General course.
These examples offer grounds for exchange between associations. An integrated programme for former professionals and support for progression through existing qualifications address related needs, although they should not be treated as equivalent courses.
Education, access and the licence debate
Keisuke Honda has raised a separate question about entry to coaching work. In a July 2026 post, he distinguished the value of coaching education from making a licence a mandatory condition of employment.
That distinction deserves to be represented accurately. The educational value of a course and the justification for a compulsory qualification are connected questions, but evidence for one does not settle the other.
A system can recognise prior experience while asking candidates to demonstrate what they can teach. It must also consider the time and resources needed to participate, and the opportunities available to people who arrive without a celebrated playing career. Neither reputation nor a certificate alone tells the whole story of a coach’s work.
For this new German cohort, the most interesting developments will take place in the sessions they lead and the players they help. Some knowledge will prove transferable; other habits may need to change. Football benefits when there is a place for both discoveries.
Prepared from public sources checked on 21 October 2026 JST. FootballGravity has not interviewed the participants or observed the course.
Marie-Louise Eta and Sabrina Wittmann have made careers in places once unfamiliar to women coaches. Germany’s next challenge is to make those routes easier to follow—and to sustain.
When Union Berlin needed a coach for the closing weeks of the 2025/26 men’s Bundesliga season, it turned to someone already working inside the club. Marie-Louise Eta had coached its young players and worked with its senior teams. Her appointment was historic. The experience behind it had accumulated through less conspicuous jobs.
That is a useful place to begin looking at women’s progress in football coaching. A first appointment changes what people can imagine. The work that makes another appointment possible takes longer: earning a qualification, being trusted with a team, developing players and finding the next employer.
By October 2026, German football offers examples of those connections being made. It also offers a reminder that a coaching career includes setbacks. Eta’s move across Union’s teams and Sabrina Wittmann’s long association with Ingolstadt reveal different parts of that working life. Around them, the DFB and UEFA are investing in education and professional contacts. The evidence supports a story of opportunities being built, with some reported progression, while leaving the wider employment picture open.
A career inside a club
Union appointed Eta on 11 April 2026, following the departure of Steffen Baumgart. The men’s team still needed points to secure its Bundesliga status. Eta was then coaching the boys’ under-19 side; her future role leading the women’s first team was already part of the club’s plans.
The Bundesliga’s season review records seven points from her five matches and survival. She became the league’s first woman head coach. Those five games were a meaningful responsibility, though far too small a sample to establish any general claim about women’s coaching performance.
Her route through Union is more revealing for this article. In a July overview, the DFB describes work since 2023 as an assistant with the boys’ under-19s and men’s first team, individual coaching with the women, and head-coaching roles with the boys’ under-19s and senior men before taking charge of the women.
These are different jobs, with different demands. Together they illustrate how a club can get to know a coach’s work across its own departments. Eta’s move into the women’s team should be understood as a substantial appointment in its own right, rather than a step down from a brief spell in men’s football.
That expectation makes room for serious football discussion. How does a coach prepare a team? How well do players understand their tasks? What improves over time? Gender alone supplies no answer to those questions.
When Ingolstadt extended her contract on 6 March 2026, it recorded 79 competitive matches in charge. She had completed her Pro licence that January. Her appointment therefore also shows that practical responsibility and formal education can overlap; a coaching career does not always follow a tidy sequence of qualifications followed by promotion.
On 24 September, Ingolstadt relieved her of her duties. The club cited sporting development across seasons and results in the current campaign. Its statement traced her work in the academy back to 2009. Wittmann said she had wanted to continue and described how much the club meant to her.
A dismissal is a loss for the person involved. It should not be celebrated as evidence of equality, nor can the club’s stated sporting reasons establish that every aspect of the decision was free from bias. What the record does show is a career with sustained responsibility, further qualification and a contract renewal, followed by a difficult ending.
For football’s employment culture, the next appointment matters too. Experienced coaches carry knowledge beyond the club where they first established themselves. Whether women can build that same continuity across employers belongs in any serious account of progress. This article does not establish a subsequent appointment for Wittmann.
Connecting qualifications with work
The DFB’s June 2024 coaching FAQ gives a useful dated reference: 3,901 women held a valid coaching licence on 1 June that year. It also said Germany had trained 31 women at Pro level. Those figures describe different things—valid licences at a specified date and a cumulative training total. Neither is a count of women employed by professional clubs in October 2026.
Professional contact is one of the bridges between qualification and work. In an announcement dated 1 October 2026, the DFB reported its third career forum for women coaches. Participants holding at least a B+ licence met professional-club representatives and academy sporting staff through speed interviews and other sessions. The particular emphasis was access to boys’ and men’s football.
The DFB says earlier forums had successfully brought coaches and clubs together. Its report does not quantify resulting appointments or promotions. The practical contribution is nevertheless clear: qualified coaches meet people involved in hiring, and clubs encounter candidates whose work they may not previously have known.
There is also evidence beyond general coaching courses. In September the DFB reported on 18 women taking a goalkeeper-coaching B-licence course, including Almuth Schult and Laura Benkarth. Supported by the DFB and FIFA, with scholarships for every participant, it was scheduled to finish by February 2027. It was still a course in progress when this article was prepared.
Specialist coaching deserves attention alongside the head coach’s seat. Retaining a goalkeeper’s experience in the game creates another possible professional route. These examples concern coaching and coach education; they cannot establish a broader employment trend across analysis, medicine, recruitment or the rest of a club’s staff.
What UEFA’s evidence can tell us
UEFA’s September 2026 update says its Coach Development Programme for Women had helped more than 3,000 women advance their careers since 2016, with more than 150 gaining a Pro licence. It also outlines options for associations to expand Pro-course capacity. Some additional places serve coaches working in women’s football as well as female coaches; the two groups should not be treated as interchangeable.
There is a reported employment-related outcome too. In its June account of the coach mentor programme, UEFA says it had paired 55 women with mentors since the pilot in 2018. More than 80 per cent of mentees had subsequently earned promotions, including moves from assistant to head coach, into older age groups or to higher-ranked teams.
That is encouraging evidence from a selected programme, reported by its organiser. The article does not provide a comparison group or enough detail to calculate an annual promotion rate. It cannot tell us how much of that progression was caused by mentoring, or how women coaches across Europe fare as a whole. It does show why following careers after a course or programme can be more informative than counting places alone.
A dated qualification snapshot; not a 2026 employment count.
UEFA programme · September 2026 report
More than 3,000 women supported since 2016; more than 150 gained Pro licences (UEFA)
Programme totals with different measures; not a count of professional jobs.
UEFA mentors · June 2026 report
More than 80% of mentees subsequently promoted (UEFA)
Organiser-reported outcome for a selected programme; no causal estimate.
DFB forum · October 2026 report
Third forum linking qualified women coaches with clubs (DFB)
Recruitment contacts; no quantified placement rate in the report.
Room for more kinds of coach
The case for opening these routes does not require a theory that women lead more gently, communicate better or possess some shared tactical instinct. A former goalkeeper, an academy teacher and a senior-team assistant bring different experience. Their individual methods deserve examination on their own terms.
For a club, widening the field of candidates creates the possibility of finding expertise it might otherwise overlook. That is a sporting opportunity as well as an issue of fair access. Its value depends on the work people are enabled to do: the players they develop, the responsibilities they earn and the teams they help improve.
The familiar pathway—qualification, academy experience, an assistant’s role, a head-coaching job and another appointment—is best read as a set of connections to make possible. Specialist careers and leadership in women’s football also have value without leading to a men’s first-team post.
By October 2026, there are concrete achievements to recognise: Eta’s responsibilities across Union, Wittmann’s extended tenure at Ingolstadt, repeated DFB career forums and UEFA’s reported mentoring outcomes. Establishing a change in the wider pipeline will require comparable employment records over time, including retention and reappointment. For now, football has several routes worth developing—and coaches whose next work deserves the same attention as their first breakthrough.
Sources checked on 15 October 2026 JST. This article draws on public records and attributed reporting; it does not represent interviews conducted by FootballGravity.
