There’s not much Olympique Lyonnais need to be taught when it comes to running a successful women’s football team; they have, after all, been the dominant force in Europe for more than a decade, winning six of the last seven Champions Leagues.
They probably could do, though, with a lesson on the birds and the bees because they appeared to be profoundly shocked back in 2021 when Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir told them she was having a baby, like it had never occurred to them that a member of their squad could become pregnant.
And once it sank in that their Icelandic midfielder would be out of action for a few months, their response, after the initial public congratulations, was to stop paying her, despite Fifa having brought in maternity regulations earlier in the year to protect players in just such situations.
Once she returned home to Iceland for the closing months of her pregnancy, Gunnarsdóttir was cut adrift by the club, Lyon never once contacting her to enquire about her welfare.
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She all but forecast that outcome when she described her feelings on discovering she was pregnant.
“You feel like you’re guilty of something, like you’re letting people down,” she wrote in her piece for The Players’ Tribune this week on the saga.
Perhaps the most hard-to-fathom aspect of the story is that neither Gunnarsdóttir nor Lyon seemed to know how her situation would or should be handled, this being 2021 and not, say, 1926.
She assumed she would continue to be paid, Lyon felt no such obligation. That neither party was clear on this was staggering.
When her wages failed to turn up for the first couple of months, she put it down to a glitch in the system. When she eventually contacted the club about it, she received no reply.
When she was finally informed by Lyon that her ‘unavailability’ meant she was not entitled to her wages, she told them she would take her case to Fifa. At which point, she said, club director Vincent Ponsot warned: “If Sara goes to Fifa with this, she has no future in Lyon at all.”
It’s at times like this that you almost feel sorry for folk like Vincent Ponsot. He’s only in his 40s, so he’s hardly a dinosaur, even if his behaviour resembled one. But that he so utterly misread the character and resolve of Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir, thinking a threat of that manner would silence her . . . God love him.
This week, the report by the Fifa tribunal to which Gunnarsdóttir took her case against Lyon was published, detailing in 11,575 words – and you’d have needed a degree in accountancy and employment law to understand most of them – why she had become the first player to win a claim through Fifa’s maternity regulations. Lyon were ordered to pay her €82,000 in wages that they had withheld from her during her pregnancy.
It was a hell of a win for Gunnarsdóttir, who left Lyon for Juventus last summer, one that should have enormous consequences for any players who find themselves in her situation in the future, giving them protection from clubs who feel their financial obligations end with the impending pitter patter of tiny feet.
Welcome to the 21st century, football.
Fifpro (International Federation of Professional Footballers) represented Gunnarsdóttir through the case. Alexandra Gomez Bruinewoud, one of their lawyers, hailed the finding of the Fifa tribunal, hoping that it will have a major knock-on effect in the women’s game.
“Unfortunately, many federations have not yet implemented these regulations at national level,” she said. “Clubs sometimes do not apply them because of bad faith, but many times it is due to the lack of knowledge that these exist and that they are mandatory also at national level.”
She cited the example of a professional Venezuelan player who was sacked by her club on telling them that she was pregnant.
“And this in a country where pregnant workers are naturally protected,” she said.
Football, in fairness, has been gender-neutral through the years in assuming that basic employment rights don’t apply to their players.
Lyon have sounded a touch indignant about it all. A club long since hailed as pioneering and progressive, its owner Jean-Michel Aulas spotting the potential in the women’s game long before most of Europe’s major clubs showed any interest in that side of their operations, now on the losing side of a landmark ruling in favour of female footballers.
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You don’t need to sympathise with them, but it’s easy enough to understand them feeling sorry for themselves. For the last 20 years or so, Lyon have signed some of the biggest names in the women’s game, largely attracting them by paying wages that few other clubs could match.
And then their heads are blown when a player on a sizeable salary announces she is pregnant and will be unavailable for several months, but they must continue paying her wages, all the while wishing she’d held off ‘til her playing days were done. If they said that out loud, they’d be run out of town, but you can get it.
But, welcome to life, Lyon, women have babies, it happens, the world would struggle to keep on turning if they didn’t, so as a pre-eminent force in the women’s game, suck it up, do the right thing, stop whining.
“I’m very hopeful about the women’s game.,” wrote Gunnarsdóttir this week.
“There’s a lot to celebrate. The facilities? The investment? The level? The fans filling up the stadium? We’ve come so far. That’s undeniable. But the reality is, when it comes to the overall culture? There’s a lot more work to do. We deserve better.”
The Fifa ruling is a sizeable step in the right direction.
