The most defining stories for women's football in this country were written in Frankfurt and Wolfsburg.

The 1. FFC from Main and Lower Saxony's VfL ensured the great moments, won championship titles in a row, triumphed in the European Cup and employed countless national players from all over the world.

But there was hardly a real duel for the top in the Bundesliga between these two.

The Frankfurt women were the dominant force at the beginning of the millennium.

But when the star began to sink with the beginning trend that pure women's football clubs can no longer keep up with the women's sections of the big clubs, the triumph of Wolfsburg began.

The 1. FFC Frankfurt was recently only home to a young team, talented, but only good for midfield places in terms of substance.

Coach Niko Arnautis still remembers duels against Wolfsburg, in which his team "only crossed the center line twice within 90 minutes with the ball at their feet".

Fusion and more professional structures

Those days are over.

Last summer, the FFC slipped into the first club in Frankfurt, the Eintracht.

The merger has professionalized the structures and strengthened the management team - and now, in the first year after the merger, brought an “ultimate highlight”, as Laura Freilang says.

This Sunday (4 p.m.) the Hessians face VfL Wolfsburg in the DFB Cup final in Cologne.

Attacker Laura Freilang embodies the upswing in Frankfurt in particular.

The 23-year-old benefited from the Art Nouveau style that resulted from being economically dependent on the FFC.

Laura Freilang is now a national player and has already scored 17 goals in the current Bundesliga round.

“Maybe we want the cup more than Wolfsburg,” she says.

Below expectations

Laura Freilang should also be guided by the principle of hope. Because the record cup winner from Frankfurt with nine triumphs meets the cup power of modern times. The Wolfsburg women have received the cup six times in a row after the Cologne finals, a total of seven times in the past eight years. The Frankfurt women, on the other hand, have not shown up there since 2014 and are currently in sixth place this season, well below expectations.

The balance of power is clear, but, according to the approach of the Frankfurt team with no endgame experience, it is not cemented in a single (final) game over 90 minutes. “We want to deliver a tough fight right from the start. We believe in ourselves very much. Already when we reached the finals, we were able to set a clear exclamation mark, ”says the SGE trainer and Frankfurt-born Arnautis, in whose goal national goalkeeper Merle Frohms is expecting a busy afternoon. "We also have to be ready to play dirty and don't want to die in beauty," says the 26-year-old.

The league duel last Sunday, which the Wolfsburg women won 3-2, resulted in fresh ideas for possible solutions for Eintracht. In the second half on the Main, however, the Hessians scored two beautiful goals that gave them courage to see each other again on the Rhine. National coach Martina Voss-Tecklenburg is looking forward to this "exciting constellation with the young, ambitious Eintracht team on the one hand and the Wolfsburg women with their incredibly impressive trophy record on the other".

The cup final is generally the largest women's football stage of the year. Because this match always attracts more attention than the league championship, which has been reduced to a pure duel between the teams from VfL Wolfsburg and Bayern Munich, which are far away from the competition. But the merger between FFC and Eintracht has brought movement to the scene. The goal of building on the old heyday and breaking into the phalanx of the top teams has been formulated. A cup coup would be just the right thing to accelerate development.