2024-06-21 00:25:29
She has been working for ZDF for many years. Since she began commentating on males’s soccer, she has typically been criticized. However what is definitely identified about Claudia Neumann?
“I might be the final particular person to level the finger at others and say: ‘You are a whole fool!'” Claudia Neumann as soon as mentioned in an interview – and now she herself has to expertise repeatedly how she turns into the goal of untamed insults. With the beginning of the European Championships at dwelling and Neumann’s first appearances as a commentator on ZDF, criticism of her is growing once more.
Each colleagues and her broadcaster are collectively supporting her, defending Neumann as a commentator who has been “at dwelling in dwell soccer for years” and who brings together with her “a substantial quantity of expertise along with her skilled experience.” On Thursday, the sports activities journalist will as soon as once more be heard on ZDF at a dwell European Championship match: Claudia Neumann will commentate on the Denmark-England match. However what is definitely identified in regards to the 60-year-old girl from Düren in North Rhine-Westphalia, aside from the fixed dialogue about her?
Claudia Neumann has been a sports activities reporter at ZDF since 1999. Twelve years later, she is making German sports activities historical past: Neumann is the primary feminine commentator on German tv to cowl a serious soccer occasion – the Ladies’s World Cup in Germany. The subsequent chapter follows in 2016: on the European Soccer Championship in France, she turns into the primary girl to commentate on a males’s event.
However she is met with hatred, time and again. So she makes a advantage out of necessity and goes on the offensive: in 2020 she revealed her e-book “Hat she even obtained permission to be outdoors the kitchen? How I discovered to take life in a sporting manner”, wherein she addresses hate speech on social networks and her personal life path as a sports activities journalist in a male-dominated subject.
With a view to her critics, Neumann as soon as coined the phrase: “Most of them weren’t even born after I was already scoring overhead kicks.” When requested about this in an interview with the soccer journal “Fums” in January 2023, she mentioned: “It was a spontaneous response that I mentioned within the lightness of being throughout the 2016 European Championship in Paris, when the whole lot collapsed round me and everybody needed to know one thing. Additionally that I might positively not throw myself off the Eiffel Tower now.”
On this dialog, she says that she by no means performed aggressive soccer, “as a result of there was no such factor close to me and I wasn’t actually into it.” However she at all times liked soccer, “when it appeared good.” She explains: “From a younger age, I began to establish a recreation as stunning. We watched the few video games that had been on TV after which replayed them. There have been video games the place you needed to rating a objective and solely a volley counted and comparable tales. From that I deduced how stunning diving headers and different acrobatic strikes are.”
Neumann grew up within the Eifel area. After graduating from highschool in 1984 and spending time overseas, Neumann studied German, schooling and sports activities in Bonn from 1986 to 1992. Her nice soccer position mannequin was at all times Klaus Fischer, who was significantly profitable with FC Schalke 04 within the Nineteen Seventies, together with changing into runner-up and cup winner. Fischer “transformed probably the most stunning overhead kicks,” says Neumann. “For me, that was the perfection of aesthetics and I practiced it till I used to be dizzy – typically alone at dwelling, by placing the balls on the wall of the home myself.”
Little else is understood about Neumann’s personal life. She retains her personal life out of the general public eye. Instagram and Twitter aren’t for her, she prefers to depart that to her youthful colleagues. The truth that she turned a soccer fan within the first place was “pure coincidence”. “I grew up with solely boys round me, I’ve two brothers. There have been additionally ladies in my era who then discovered the place they might play with different girls. That was not so essential for me. I’ve at all times outlined myself by way of this recreation and have achieved that with boys all through all age teams,” mentioned the commentator.