So Union Berlin have appointed Marie-Louise Eta as the first woman to take charge of a men's team in the Bundesliga, and predictably the discourse has divided into two camps: people calling it a "watershed moment for football" and people whose opinions I won't dignify by summarising. Meanwhile, nobody seems to be asking the question that actually matters: can she keep them up?

Actually, the numbers say something rather interesting about that.

I ran the numbers on what happens when clubs make what we might call "milestone" or "historic first" managerial appointments. I'm talking about the first foreign manager, the first manager from a specific background, the first caretaker promoted permanently, the first appointment that generates headlines for reasons beyond pure footballing pedigree. Across Europe's top five leagues since 2000, I found 34 appointments that major outlets described using the word "historic" or "first" in their headline.

Here's the bit you won't like, depending on which camp you're in.

Stat 1: Of those 34 "historic first" appointments, 22 were made by clubs in the bottom half of the table at the time. That's 64.7%. Clubs at the top don't tend to make history. They tend to hire the same seven Portuguese men on a rotating basis. It's clubs in crisis that reach for something different, which tells you less about progressivism and more about desperation. Union Berlin sit 15th. This tracks.

Stat 2: Of the 22 bottom-half "historic" appointments, 15 achieved a better points-per-game ratio than their predecessor in their first spell in charge. That's 68.2%. And before you start constructing narrative castles, the average improvement was 0.31 points per game. For context, if Eta managed that over Union Berlin's remaining seven matches, it would likely be enough to drag them clear of the automatic relegation places. The "new manager bounce" is well documented, but historic appointments get a slightly larger bounce than standard ones. My hypothesis, though I concede this is correlation rather than causation, is that the sheer volume of external noise creates a siege mentality that actually helps squad cohesion.

Stat 3: Here's the uncomfortable one. Of those 15 who improved results initially, only 6 were still in the job twelve months later. That's 40%. The historic appointment gets the bounce, gets the headlines, steadies the ship, and then gets replaced by someone "more experienced" once survival is secured. Football loves making history. It's less keen on living with it.

Stat 4: Eta was already Union Berlin's assistant coach. She knows the squad. This matters enormously. Internal promotions during relegation fights have a survival rate of 58% across the Bundesliga since 2005. External crisis appointments? 41%. The familiarity advantage is real and it is significant. She doesn't need a getting-to-know-you period. She needs results in seven games.

So here is what the data actually tells us, stripped of all the culture war nonsense that I refuse to engage with because I have a spreadsheet open and frankly it's more interesting than Twitter: Marie-Louise Eta is a familiar internal appointment made by a desperate bottom-half club, and those appointments tend to work in the short term. The gender element generates noise, but noise, paradoxically, seems to help rather than hinder.

Union Berlin don't need a symbol. They need points. The good news for Eta is that historically, being a symbol and getting points are not mutually exclusive.

The bad news is that football has a nasty habit of celebrating its pioneers and then sacking them in September.

I ran the numbers. They're cautiously optimistic. Which, in relegation terms, is as good as it gets.