This week’s newsletter looks at a historic vote next Monday whether to grant an independent women’s club a licence to compete in the female Eredivisie for the first time ever. A historic moment awaits for football in the Netherlands on Monday, as the country’s national governing body, the KNVB, puts a highly consequential vote to its members on whether to grant an independent women’s club a licence to compete in the Eredivisie for the first time.
![[Tom Garry]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2024/06/19/Tom_Garry.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
For the three women who have co-founded the new club hoping to “change the system”, the irony is not lost on them that everyone voting in this crucial ballot is a man. Yet they have high hopes that their dream is going to become a reality. If they get the yes vote they crave, their new club Hera United, based in Amsterdam, will play in the country’s top division next season and stage matches in the city’s historic Olympic Stadium.
![[Barbara Barend, Marieke Visser, and Susan van Geenen]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/d94f4e2ed9f48a754492088313fcfd9279eda6e9/0_0_3149_2362/master/3149.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
It was in Amsterdam at the end of the 2022-23 campaign, when Ajax had won the women’s title, that Hera United’s co-founder and co-owner Marieke Visser, an author of children’s books and a columnist who previously founded a communications agency aiming to close the gender gap, concluded that an independent women’s club was the only way to truly advance the game for girls.
“Ajax Women didn’t get a celebration in the square in Amsterdam that is tradition for the men,” she recalls. “That was my vivid moment when I was thinking ‘if not now, then when are we going to get equal opportunities? How long do we have to keep begging for recognition? As long as the women are part of the men’s club, the focus will always be on the men – so what if we started our own club?”.
