Marta Vieira da Silva, known to most Brazilians as simply Marta, is a female futebol (soccer) legend. She has her origins in pelada, pickup Brazilian soccer games that I described in a previous cultural post. These are very informal, involving a makeshift ball and anyone in the neighborhood willing to play. However, she faced a lot of difficulty growing up playing with boys who were not accepting of her playing soccer with them as a female. She initially played with a local boys team, but was discovered by a scout at age 14. This is a typical age for soccer recruitment in Brazil. In a previous article that I read, it was talking about 16 year old boys describing themselves as “too old” to be recruited and that they now played in peladas just for fun. She was recruited by the scout to play on a new women’s team for a well-known soccer club in Rio de Janeiro. She played on Brazilian women’s teams until 2004, when she joined a team in Sweden. She led them to many prestigious tournament championships and scored 111 goals in 103 league games during her time with the Swedish team. This was when she began to attract international acclaim. Afterward, she continued to play on teams in the U.S., Brazil, and Sweden. She also played on Brazil’s women’s team in the Olympics and World Cup. She has 17 World Cup goals, making her the highest goal scorer in Women’s World Cup history. She also has won the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Player of the Year award in 2006-10 and 2018 (6 times).
She is also a UN Women Goodwill ambassador as a role model and advocate for women’s equity in sports. She is also just generally seen as a role model among female Brazilians for the classist and sexist barriers that she had to break through to have her success in soccer.
She was also appointed as a Sustainable Development Goals Advocate for 2019-2020. She works specifically in the division of female empowerment. She believes that women playing sports is an important means of empowerment for women to be able to “challenge socio-cultural norms and gender stereotypes and increase their self-esteem, develop life skills and leadership; they can improve their health and ownership and understanding of their bodies; become aware of what is violence and how to prevent it, and look for available services and develop economic skills."
I’m writing about Marta as my cultural post because she truly created a cultural movement through being a woman in futebol, which is a powerful means of change and social movement in Brazil. She is a household name and one that is female, rather than many of the male soccer legends that come from Brazil. Her work on the field and off the field has no doubt inspired many women across the world, but particularly those in Brazil. While there are still a lot of improvements to be had in terms of women’s soccer in Brazil, Marta undoubtably continues to change its course for the better.
Comments