Unclear position in the Rubiales case
Olympic champion Kemme is annoyed by DFB “bullshit”
September 22, 2023, 8:54 a.m
The DFB is keeping a very low profile in the affair surrounding the resigned Spanish association boss Luis Rubiales. Former national player Tabea Kemme is “stunned” by this. She accuses the association of falling “over and over again into a loyalty trap”.
Ex-national player Tabea Kemme has strongly criticized the behavior of the German Football Association (DFB) in the scandal involving top Spanish official Luis Rubiales. “The DFB has no clear stance on the ‘Rubiales case’ – to this day. People rub their eyes in disbelief,” wrote the 31-year-old in her column for the news portal t-online.
While the German national players and other national associations such as the one from Sweden had decided to take a stand, the DFB would fall “again and again into a loyalty trap,” Kemme added: “The DFB workshops are always about elaborated ones Guidelines in which values such as respect and a shared coexistence are propagated. With respect: This is all bullshit if it is not lived.”
“A lot of headwind”
She herself felt “a lot of headwind” for her publicly demonstrated solidarity with world champion Jennifer Hermoso, who was kissed on the mouth by Spain’s former association boss Rubiales at the World Cup award ceremony. This showed her “that even in Germany, problems can arise within an existing employer-employee relationship if you independently display a certain attitude.” Kemme, who won Olympic gold in Rio in 2016 with the DFB team, wore the Spanish national jersey with Hermoso’s number 10 during her work as an expert for the pay-TV broadcaster Sky during the Bundesliga game at the beginning of September between Borussia Mönchengladbach and Bayern Munich.
Former DFB President Reinhard Grindel recently unintentionally openly demonstrated what Kemme meant by her criticism. Grindel had directed Karl-Heinz Rummenigges, who described Rubiales’ kiss as “with all due respect – absolutely okay”: “With Rummenigge you have to see: he sits with Rubiales on the UEFA Executive Committee. And Rummenigge is a very loyal man. He is decent, through and through. But he doesn’t want to publicly give the impression that he’s trying to force something into someone,” said Grindel – and in doing so inadvertently highlighted the men’s alliance power structures and loyalty relationships in world football, which have been loudly criticized by numerous organizations and most recently by FIFA presidential candidate Lise Klaveness .
The team council of the DFB team had reacted to the incident – and perhaps also to Rummenigge, although without mentioning the former Bayern boss, who is still powerful in European football, by name – wrote: “Such behavior is not acceptable and is even more intolerable also to downplay it. […] Nobody, absolutely nobody should dismiss this as a small thing,” said a statement published by national players such as Svenja Huth and Lina Magull, but which was not shared on official DFB profiles. It was “sad, even if in German football Apparently not everyone in the world is enlightened enough to be able to assess this.