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2014
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core country in women’s football (from 2007 until 2011 always among the Top 3, with
the USA and Germany)
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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
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. 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