The choice of speakers for the European Championship matches in Switzerland is causing disappointment in some places.
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- 16 women were trained as stadium announcers, two per venue. One of the two would have been the main speaker in each stadium.
- Because the selection criterion of dialect has been dropped, the trained speakers are now being deployed differently than originally planned.
- The women from Bern, Lucerne and Basel will be left out in the cold for the time being.
16 female stadium speakers were trained for the European Championships in Switzerland, two women per stadium. Andrea Adamina and Mirja Mätzener, for example, were scheduled for the games in Wankdorf. Adamina told "SRF" that they had assumed throughout the training that one of them would be the main speaker and the other would be available as a back-up.
But things turned out differently than originally planned: Neither of the two women will be the main speaker at the European Championships. "I was informed by email and had to swallow empty at first," says the disappointed Adamina. In Basel and Lucerne too, none of the women trained for these stadiums were selected as the main speaker.
What happened?
"UEFA informed us at the beginning of June that the speakers at the European Championship tournament will not speak Swiss German as well as English, but High German. That's why the selection criterion of dialect was dropped for us," explains Alice Holzer, project manager at the SFA.
A replacement speaker has apparently already withdrawn. "We very much regret this, but we also understand it." However, the training was not just about the European Championship, but also about training more female voices for future football matches.
In February, fifty women who were interested in acting as speakers at the home European Championships applied. In the end, the association selected 16 of them and had them trained.
