KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – Head coach of Jamaica’s national football team, Winfried Schafer is one of three nominees for the German Football Ambassador title.
Also nominated from a list of 35 candidates were Monika Staab and Klaus Stärk.
Staab works in youth and women’s football and is currently the coach of the Qatar women’s national team. She played for Paris St. Germain, Queens Park Rangers and Southampton before embarking on a coaching career with the women’s team of FFC Frankfurt, with whom she won the German championship four times, the German Cup five times and the UEFA cup. Since 2007, she has been working with FIFA, setting up projects in over fifty countries, including Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, where the idea is to empower women and girls to make a stand in society.
Klaus Stärk is the technical director of the Namibia Football Association and has been overseeing projects run by the German foreign ministry and the German Football Federation (DFB) since 2008.
These projects involve the training of coaches and referees, as well as youth work and projects in girls’ football. As a coach, Stärk has worked in Afghanistan, Lebanon, South Africa and Mongolia.
The most well-known of the nominees is Schäfer. The former Bundesliga coach has worked on four continents. With Cameroon’s national team he celebrated his biggest success, winning the Africa Cup of Nations in 2002.
