The grounds for VfL Wolfsburg’s inferiority complex are thin, at best. This is a club that has been crowned champion of Germany in five of the last six seasons. It has reached at least the quarterfinals of the Women’s Champions League in every year of the competition’s existence. It has made five finals, and won two of them.
Its squad drips with experience and talent: Alexandra Popp, the German talisman, and her international teammates Svenja Huth, Merle Frohms and Marina Hegering; Lena Oberdorf, arguably Europe’s most exciting young player; the seasoned Dutch international Jill Roord, restored to Germany after a couple of years away in England.
By any measure, Wolfsburg is a bona fide superpower, a dominant force domestically and a longstanding contender internationally. And yet even its players seem to have internalized the idea that they are underdogs. A few weeks ago, Popp herself suggested that Bayern Munich — Wolfsburg’s only serious rival for the German title — had started the season as “strong favorites, and that has been the case for the last couple of years.”
It is not quite clear why anyone — let alone Popp, fully aware of the quality of player lining up alongside her on the field — should believe that to be the case. The most obvious rationale…
