Sleeplessness is about to hit soccer fans in the Americas as national teams prepare to battle it out for the 2023 Women’s World Cup in New Zealand and Australia (more than 15 hours apart from Colombia). The United States team arrives at this ninth edition of the tournament as the favorite, while in Latin America the situation of the teams is very different.
Countries from the northern hemisphere have won the Cup in the past eight editions of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. Reigning champions USA have won the tournament four times, and Germany have won twice. But the land of Pelé, Messi and Suárez, South America, has barely made a final appearance.
Brazil, despite having some of the most celebrated players in the world, such as Marta Vieira da Silva, six times chosen FIFA Best Playerand like the record-breaking Miraildes Maciel Mota, better known as Formiga, she has only reached the final once, in 2007, in which she took second place.
Why is there such disparity in a region with a globally recognized passion for soccer? The journalist and researcher Lu Castro affirms that there is a rooting in the old gender structures in the women’s sports institutions in the region. “This situation is even deeper in soccer and is clearly present in our sports entities,” she said. Interest in women’s teams is undoubtedly growing, but the audience and funding gap between men’s and women’s soccer remains large.
Likewise, the women’s teams in Latin America do not receive the same public recognition as in the northern hemisphere. For example, President Joe Biden himself was approached to present the United States team for this year’s championshipand other stars like Taylor Swift.
“For nearly 40 years, the United States women’s national soccer team has proven that they are true champions. For lifting trophies, for fighting for gender equality, these women have been an inspiration to everyone Americans of all ages”, were the words of President Biden in the team announcement.
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late recognition
The first women’s Copa Libertadores club tournament was held in 2009, five decades after the first tournament for men’s players. and heThe South American competition attracts a small fraction of the audience and media attention that European women’s tournaments have in the Uefa Women’s Champions League..
In Argentina, the country that currently holds the men’s world title, the women’s team has never made it beyond the group stage in both the World Cup and past Olympic Games. “Not surprising given the historical invisibility of women’s footballthe lack of institutional support and its scant presence in the media, to mention just a few factors,” said social scientist Mariana Ibarra.
In Brazil, like en Germany and England, where the national associations prohibited the sport for women until 1970, women’s soccer was restricted by law until 1979. In 1941, then-President Getúlio Vargas signed a decree that deprived Brazilian women of playing soccer in order to preserve their “maternal nature”. Although the sport was not banned in Argentina, the players were not considered professional athletes until the 1990s.
“Soccer was not seen as a sport for women,” added Ibarra. For Colombian players, being able to play professionally is also a very recent change.. “The professionalization of women’s football came only after FIFA’s support for the sport,” said historian Gabriela Ardila Biela. To this day, Colombian players do not have the opportunity to play professionally in their country, despite pressure from sports entities.
For example, in 2019, the South American Football Confederation, Conmebol, and Fifa established by rule that men’s teams can only participate in international competitions if the club invests in professional women’s teams.
They play despite everything
The three South American countries that qualified for the 2023 Cup, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, can boast of their pioneering clubs that paved the way for women’s soccer, such as Argentina’s UAI Urquiza, a partnership between a private university and a Buenos Aires railway workers’ club founded in 1950.
The club was indirectly responsible for the professionalization of women’s football in that country. Male athletes had achieved their recognition as professional athletes after a strike in 1931, but lThe women had to wait another 87 years.
After UAI Urquiza player Macarena Sánchez sued the club in 2019, the Argentine soccer players union recognized her as a worker, paving the way for Argentine athletes.
Mariana Ibarra assured that as feminist groups have become stronger in Argentina, support for the sport has also begun to grow. “Many of the players who are heading to the 2023 World Cup are protagonists of this transformative moment that permeates all areasincluding sports and politics,” said the expert.
For its part, in Brazil, a tournament created and sponsored in 2013 gave impetus to the sport. However, ten years later, conditions are not ideal.
This is evidenced by several facts. A few weeks before Swedish coach Pia Sundhage announced the formation of the Brazilian national team for 2023, a team from Rondônia, Real Aríquemes, refused to play because their wages had not been paid for two months. Meanwhile, the Ceará Sporting Club played a whole competition with its amateur team, with players as young as 14 on the field. The club had laid off most of its professional players to save money and help the men’s team avoid relegation.. If this is the reality of the largest and richest country that will represent the region in the World Cup, what can we expect for the region in the world arena?
Meanwhile, hehe audience for the 2019 Women’s World Cup, held in France, doubled in Brazil, reaching 108 million viewers, so the event organizers are optimistic for 2023, despite the time difference. As the star player Formiga said in an interview, women’s football is gaining more and more attention from the public. “We have come a long way. Now we just need the clubs to embrace the sport,” she said.
MATÍAS PINTO*
AMERICAS QUARTERLY
SAO PAULO
Historian and journalist who covers the intersection between soccer and politics in Latin America.
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All the teams have their claims By:
Antoine Maignan – AFP – Sydney
The Women’s World Cup is at a crossroads of demands that are shaking this discipline, between player revolts and unequal treatment, spreading fear that the gap that separates soccer powers from the rest will widen. On one of the two sides of the coin, that of the European and North American mastodons, their largestaffs its cutting-edge technologies and its wealthy federations.On the other are the teams that are trailing in terms of resources, which have not been given anything
who fight to make a name for themselves and even ask for donations to finance their competitions. It is one of the paradoxes of this World Cup, which could mark a before and after in women’s football
and take it to another dimension. Fifa’s announcement, which tripled the World Cup prize pool compared to the 2019 edition in France, is still resonating, bringing the prize pool to a historic total of US$152 million, six times more than what was earmarked for the 2015 World Cup in Canada.Each soccer player selected for the event will receive a minimum of US$30,000
a figure that could rise to US$ 270,000 for each of the 23 world champions.
the jamaican team “I am so proud to be a part of this change. I have seen women’s football go from zero to one hundred. But I think it’s only the first step, the road is still long compared to men. I hope we can build on this,” said the Australian advocate. Ellie Carpenter
about this unprecedented evolution of women’s football. Despite this message of hope, the wind of revolt within the women’s teams todemand more rights, consideration and fairness
has never been felt, less on the eve of this World Cup. The simple example of Jamaica is revealing. The Reggae Girlz are playing their second consecutive Cup, but a few days before the start, The players issued a statement denouncing “the extreme disorganization”
of their national team and asked for help after having given up several games in recent months for logistical reasons. Havana Solaun’s mother, a Jamaican midfielder, launched an online fundraiser to cover the team’s accommodation costs, raising nearly $50,000 in mid-July.
(Also: Admirable! The noble gesture of the Japanese after beating Zambia in the World Cup) The Nigerian national team is also on the verge of crisis: the coach Randy Waldrum widely criticized the conditions of preparation for the tournament on the podcastSounding Off on Soccer
, regretting above all the cancellation of a training concentration by the Federation. He recalled that his players had to boycott training in the middle of the African Cup in 2022 to get their bonuses paid.South Africa also decided to boycott its warm-up match against Botswana on July 2.
after having signed contracts that, according to the players, did not comply with the agreements. “It’s exasperating,” said the symbol player of this fight for equality, the American Megan Rapinoe, recently when questioned about these cases.“It should not be like that. But I think it’s getting better every time. Now there are more ways in which these teams can rely on”
. The demands are not confined only to nations with more modest budgets.The Canadians threatened a strike to obtain more resources
, and several French women withdrew from the national team to press for the dismissal of their coach Corinne Diace. And Spain appears in the World Cup without a dozen ‘rebels’ who have long criticized the methods of coach Jorge Vilda. Although in his case, these complaints were not addressed.
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