“You play like wild pigs”

Slovenia’s women’s national team has had enough of their coaching staff and the association’s leadership. In an open letter to the Slovenian FA they detail the bullying, inappropriate language, sexism, racism and body-shaming they have faced. 

By Sam Kunti

Lara Prašnikar was scared to take off her sweatshirt during Slovenia’s women’s national team training. So was Dominika Čonč. They knew the rule: the whole team had to wear the same training gear. It didn’t matter who felt warm or cold, who felt the need to simply wear a T-shirt.  A veteran midfielder who plies her trade at Levante Las Planas in Spain, Čonč likened the training regime to “pretty much a dictatorship”.  Prašnikar, a striker for Eintracht Frankfurt in Germany, thought it “absurd.”

Earlier this year they had enough. Slovenia’s three captains – Prašnikar, Čonč, and Mateja Zver, a midfielder with Austrias’ St. Pölten – sat down with manager Borut Jarc and told him they were not having it any longer. “We kind of stood against that all together and said ‘listen, you know, it's not gonna work’,” Prašnikar tells Josimar. “Then, he finally accepted this thing.” 

It was a minor incident in a series of troubling episodes that have traumatised the players of the national team. In July, they wrote an open letter to the president of the Football Association of Slov...