How Copenhagen are building women’s team

FC Copenhagen’s chief executive, Jacob Lauesen, is a little late to our morning interview but he has a good excuse, having been delayed travelling back from Gothenburg, where he watched Rosengård’s 1-0 defeat of Häcken in the Swedish women’s league.
“It was just to get a glimpse of what that looks like,” Lauesen says of why the CEO of Denmark’s most successful men’s club made the trip to watch a Damallsvenskan match. Lauesen and Copenhagen’s head of women’s football, Rebecca Steele, have spent a lot of the past 18 months observing and conversing with clubs around the world as they prepared for July’s launch of their own women’s team.
Copenhagen, having failed to have a side fast-tracked into a top league, went into discussions with the local women’s team FC Damsø, resulting in a club launching as FC Copenhagen on FC Damsø’s licence in the third tier.
This type of merger is not new to the club, because Copenhagen are not a normal club. They were launched in 1992 by two financially struggling clubs, Kjøbenhavns Boldklub (continental Europe’s oldest club) and Boldklubben 1903, the former becoming the academy team and the main side operating on the licence of the latter.
A new strategy was formulated three years ago and a move into women’s football was highlighted as a priority. On 18 August Copenhagen Women secured a 3-0 win over B73 Slagelse in their league opener in front of an impressive 5,165 fans.
Why women’s football and why now, though? Put simply, they have had a space problem, with 5,000 players sharing six pitches, which has held them back. “We live in the densest area of Copenhagen,” Lauesen says. “That is one of the reasons why we haven’t moved faster [to launch a women’s team]. We started girls’ football seven years ago and are now at the age of under-14, moving up a year every year to implement it. So, in that sense, we decided to go and look for basically a different parent club.”
Meanwhile, the makeup of spectators at their men’s games is changing. “Since Euro 2020, which took place in 2021, we have seen a very big increase in female spectators, going from 15% to 25%,” Lauesen says. “On the waiting list [for season tickets] the rise is greater because, of course, season tickets are sold out. So if you look at the waiting list, even for the ultras stands, it’s close to 50-50 girls and boys.” Accommodating the rise of female fans in men’s grounds “could take a generation”, he adds.
Critical to the launch of their women’s team is having a business- and commercial-focused approach. “We’re a very young club. Even though one of our parent clubs is close to 150 years old, we are only 32 years old. Playing in the round of 16 of the Champions League, our fans have an understanding that we have reached that level not from a rich history but from being decent businesspeople. We’re not owned by Danish rich people, but we have earned our own money, we have built a sustainable business model. And the fans see that as a core value.
“We don’t even compare our media rights to the media rights in the UK. But even if we compare to the media rights in Holland, Belgium, Scotland, Portugal, they are getting two or three times the amount we are getting, but we expect to play at the level of teams such as Celtic and PSV. So we need to be able to utilise our business model faster than other clubs. That’s not why we’re doing a women’s team, but that’s how we’re going to do a women’s team.”
It means Copenhagen are asking their main partners whether they can make a separate commitment to women’s football. At the same time, they do not necessarily want to stick the women’s team in the same kit and provide the same merchandise – these things must fit the profile of the players and supporters.
“A club can’t create a women’s shirt that is the same as the men’s shirt, with a tyre company on the chest, for example, and expect a young teenage girl to run around in this shirt the next day,” Lauesen says. “From a brand perspective, that is naive.”
That strategy has worked wonders: about two weeks after the launch of their shirt for the women’s side, during Copenhagen fashion week, they had “sold more than the bottom team in the top-tier men’s league”.
Commercially they have a blank slate, but taking on a side and elevating them up the leagues isn’t easy. Some players are training with Copenhagen’s boys’ teams to help the development pipeline in the absence of an academy.
“We want to give them the best football education we can and hopefully they can develop with the project so, in five years maybe, then we will have homegrown players that we have given the best football education,” Steele says.
That is helping their boys too. “If you are a talented boy then within the academy you go to school with the boys, you have male teachers, you have male trainers, everything you see from the age of around 12 is boys and men. At FC Copenhagen, we want to create the whole person and I very strongly believe that also means that these boys need to be around female players and trainers.”
The women’s team are an equal mix of new players and Damsø players, but the buy-in from the latter wasn’t hard to get.
“There is of course some nervous activity around what will happen to the club,” Steele says. “Will we just come in and ruin everything? We had a lot of chats about how we can do this in the right way. At the very first meeting I had with the players they were of course all very nervous for themselves, for the team that’s been built over a number of years, but one player stood up and said: ‘We have to realise this is not about us, this is about all the girls around Copenhagen and this is the future of football and this has a bigger potential than just us.’
“I think that was, for me, very, very well said and it’s also what I’ve experienced within the club in general since coming in: that they know the potential with this team is so much bigger than just what is happening on pitch.”