According to Nilla Fischer, the Swedish players were forced to reveal their private parts in the middle of the 2011 World Cup.
Is this the start of a new scandal in women’s football? In a book titled “I didn’t say half” and who is already making a lot of noise in his country and beyond, Nilla Fisher, pillar of the Swedish women’s football team (188 caps), recently denounced the very controversial methods of FIFA towards professional players. In this biography without concession, the now 38-year-old veteran returns in particular to an episode that she experienced during the 2011 World Cup in Germany and reveals that her teammates and herself would have been subjected to a genital examination for the sole purpose of check if they were women.
The checks, carried out by a physiotherapist on behalf of the FIFA doctor, were decided according to her after protests from Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana, suspecting at the time the presence of men in the team from Equatorial Guinea.
“I quickly drop my training pants and my underwear”
“When I heard about this shocking demand, I fumed. In the middle of a World Cup, FIFA bigwigs wanted us to show our genitals,” says Nilla Fisher. “They told us not to shave ‘in this place’ for a few days. We then had to show them to the doctor. No one understood, but we were doing what we were told”, detailed the Swedish international who has played in four World Cups and three Olympic tournaments.
In an interview with Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, Fischer detailed the process in more depth. “I figure out what I have to do and quickly pull down my workout pants and underwear at the same time,” she said. “The physio nods and says ‘yup’, then looks at the doctor who is standing with his back to my door. He takes a note and walks down the hall to knock on the next door.”
A mouth test used for decades
Asked about her feelings, Fischer said that no player of this level “wants to jeopardize the opportunity to play a World Cup” and that all therefore complied, despite the “strange” and “humiliating” nature of the process. The former doctor of the Swedish nation Mats Börjesson for his part would have confirmed the words of the former player of Wolfsburg, giving weight to these revelations, which come a month before the start of the Women’s World Cup (July 20 – Sunday August 20, 2023), in New Zealand and Australia.
According to FIFA rules, it is the responsibility of each participating association to ensure the gender of all female players “by actively investigating any perceived deviation in secondary sex characteristic”. For decades, a mouth test — inexpensive and non-intrusive — has been able to collect DNA from inside the cheek and determine a person’s gender.