ICS Working Papers Nº1/2014

ICS

W O R K I N G P A P E R S

2014

core country in women’s football (from 2007 until 2011 always among the Top 3, with the USA and Germany) 15 which over the past years (with the curious exception of the

WWC year 2011) had also presented a stable position among the ten main sending

countries worldwide, with often more than half of their national squad players abroad.

No other FIFA Top 10 country is known as a main sender (Tiesler 2010b: 4, 7).

In Brazil, women’s football had been prohibited by law until 1975 (Votre and Mourão

2003), with ongoing legal restrictions until 1981 (Wollowski 2011) and has only

increased in popularity during the past ten years. With men’s football as the King of

Sports in Brazilian society, the women’s game and its players face a strong and

continuing social stigma based on sexist beliefs that football is not a sport for women.

The sexist myth that this violent sport might damage women’s procreation organs,

impacting on their fertility, and thus impeding them to fulfil their inherited role of

becoming mothers is still en vogue in a number of African countries (Saavedra 2003). It

had dominated equivalent discussions on the societal and legal acceptance of WF in

European countries from the late nineteenth century on, especially after the First

World War, when women’s teams were banned from the pitches, until the times of

emancipatory movements in the late 1960s and a top-down pressure exercised by

UEFA on the federal associations which led to the late acceptance of women’s teams in

European association football in the early and mid 1970s (Pfister et al. 2002).

With short exceptional periods of professional systems based on ephemeral

sponsorship, Brazil lacks a national women's league, and runs only small amateur and

semi-professional regional competitions due to limited financial interest and support.

The national league Campeonato Brasileiro de Futebol Feminino (disputed from 1994

until 2011) ran on a professional basis for only one year. The best players, such as

Marta Vieira da Silva and Cristiane Rozeira da Sousa Silva, who are both highly mobile

and earning not only better money but recognition abroad (both playing in Sweden at

the time of the 2008 Olympics and both awarded international prices), were

accidentally and directly invited to play on the Brazil women's national football team in 2002 16 . Over the past ten years, the national squad contested at the global stages such

as the World Cup finals and Olympics, increasing the popularity of TV broadcasts of

those tournaments. However, this was not sufficient to stimulate the Brazilian

footballing culture among women who prefer to support men's football over

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