2. Bundesliga Women (Germany) SGS Essen and Carl Zeiss Jena have had the sort of summer nobody wants: one spent preparing for a league they fought hard to avoid. Both have come down from the Bundesliga and both will be expected to go straight back up.
Perfectly reasonable. Also a little too neat.
SC Sand missed promotion by five points last season. SV Meppen finished nine points behind the champions but remained one of the division’s hardest sides to unsettle. Viktoria Berlin have continued to build a serious sporting project, while Turbine Potsdam are still trying to turn one of the great names in German women’s football into a stable modern team. Add two relegated Bundesliga clubs and three promoted sides with very different strengths, and the new season looks less like a two-team race than a weekly argument.
The favourites, with caveats
SGS Essen have the clearest promotion brief. Relegation ended a remarkable 22-season stay in the Bundesliga, but it did not erase the club’s identity as one of Germany’s best developers of young players. Essen know what top-flight football requires and should carry a level of speed and technical quality that many second-tier opponents cannot reproduce every week.
The awkward part is learning to be the team everyone wants to beat. Opponents will defend deeper than they did in the Bundesliga, transitions will be scruffier and a famous badge will not move a low block. Essen will have to win matches in ways they were rarely asked to last season.
Carl Zeiss Jena face a similar psychological reset. They return to a league in which there are fewer comfortable afternoons than outsiders imagine. If they preserve their defensive structure and avoid turning every match into a referendum on promotion, they have enough experience to remain near the top.
SC Sand may be the safest pick of all. Third place and 53 points last season were not an accident. Sand conceded promotion to Stuttgart and Mainz, two teams that produced 58 and 55 points respectively, and still stayed in the conversation deep into spring. Continuity matters in a league where several rivals are rebuilding.
SV Meppen belong in the same discussion. Their 49-point campaign left them fourth, but the gap to the promotion places was small enough to make refinement, rather than reinvention, the sensible summer objective.
The clubs who can break the forecast
Viktoria Berlin finished fifth with 45 points and continue to behave like a club whose ambitions extend beyond a respectable place in the table. A promotion challenge would not be a shock. Nor would a strong year from Turbine Potsdam, although their recent history makes consistency impossible to assume.
Bochum, Andernach, Ingolstadt, Borussia Mönchengladbach and Eintracht Frankfurt II form the division’s dangerous middle. They may not begin August as consensus promotion candidates, but they will decide who gets promoted. Last season only seven points separated Andernach in sixth from Potsdam in eleventh. A short good run changes the table; a short bad one changes a season.
Reserve teams add another complication. Eintracht Frankfurt II, Hoffenheim II and Köln II can look different after every international window or first-team injury. Their purpose is development, but their young players are often good enough to alter the promotion race without participating in it themselves.
Our early verdict
Essen begin as narrow favourites because relegated Bundesliga quality is difficult to ignore. Sand’s continuity makes them the most convincing established challenger, with Jena and Meppen close behind. Viktoria Berlin are the team most capable of making that four-club forecast look too conservative.
Our pick is Essen, just ahead of Sand. But this division has a habit of embarrassing tidy forecasts, and there are at least five teams good enough to be involved when spring arrives.
Follow fixtures, results and the table throughout the season on the WomenLiveScore 2. Frauen-Bundesliga hub.
Featured image: SGS Essen players warming up before a Bundesliga match in Munich, 2017. Photo by Rufus46, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
