One week before the start of the women’s soccer world cup, the search for victorious results maintains its usual hierarchy within one of the most competitive sports on the planet. However, looking at Australia and New Zealand -current World Cup venues- a debate could be glimpsed that goes beyond whether or not the Argentine players manage to break the record of winning a World Cup match for the first time, surpassing that tie against Japan in France 2019.
The professionalization of soccer in Argentina, the neighborhood clubs and their commitment to soccer not being only for men, the level of high performance that the countries with the highest hierarchy are reaching, the role of the stars and what it is to finally reach to success in sport are some of the lines of reflection that have been opened in recent years in relation to women’s football at the local level. Undoubtedly the massification of feminism had a central role in opening some doors.
Can you imagine a football that does not close its ranks in the product and in the organization as a corporation? Is women’s football capable of shaking the mandates of masculinity that lead to the usual result of a referee being kicked in the head in an amateur match? What happened from 2017 to here and what is missing to happen?
Timeline in feminist times
In 2017, the players of the Argentine national team went on strike demanding per diems and better conditions to play official matches. At that time they came from two years of inactivity because they lacked almost everything. From the clothing to the possibility of traveling to the games without having to sleep in bus terminals because a plane was unimaginable.
In that 2017 the visibility of these claims was not going to reach its maximum peak, although the context of the rise of the fight for the legalization of abortion lit the fuse in other fights. The first time that the players’ claim was heard en masse was at the Copa América Chile in 2018: the Argentine players posed for a photo making the classic Topo Gigio sign to demand that the leaders listen to their demands.
In that same year, a historic match on the Arsenal de Sarandí field spread the word that these players came to dispute a meaning in the history of women’s football in our country: they were convinced that women’s football had to be professionalized. , it was no longer possible that they had to pay for the trip to the Ezeiza property out of their own pockets to play an official match or that they had to use their own boots. That match had two fundamental events for analysis: the first is that Argentina managed to draw with Panama and qualify for the 2019 World Cup in France after 12 years of not participating in the contest. The second is that the stands were filled with feminist soccer organizations, girls from neighborhood clubs, and the same Argentine pioneers who had played in the 1971 World Cup in Mexico. -1 at the Azteca Stadium.
The planets were aligned, it was time to put all the parts together and put together a different field and get excited about a feminist football? At this juncture, the professionalization of women’s soccer arrived thanks to a hyper-media communication from the soccer player Maca Sánchez to the UAI Urquiza after the club’s decision to separate her from her duties. This unleashed a huge debate about the precariousness of female soccer players in our country.
Estefania Banini, the tenth of the national team Could she earn the same as Messi in the national team?
Was the deeper change that the players were recognized as workers? From 2019 to today, women’s soccer has contracts, trips, personnel, clothing. Nothing similar to what happened in that 2017 of the first strike. In this World Cup, for the first time in history, the players will earn a base of 30,000 dollars for being part of the World Cup and the money begins to play a relevant role in the organization of the event in relation to the facilities where they train, per diems and transfers. To this is added a fact: of the 211 Federations associated with FIFA, 8 are on the path of “Equal Pay” which seeks that the women’s teams have the same salaries as the men’s teams. Is it possible to imagine Estefania Banini earning the same as Lionel Messi? And if it is possible to imagine it, is that the revolution of women’s football?
2023: the future is already here
Seeing girls playing soccer in neighborhood clubs paints another landscape, or at least loads the inks on the possibility of formulating an illusion: that they can say “my dream is to play in the World Cup”, a phrase from Diego Maradona, a child who was a youth player of advertising and a social imaginary of football as a sport and national passion. Although this is a dream for very few, in the case of the girls it was a dream for none. Now the girls could say, perhaps timidly and in a very low percentage “I want to be a soccer player and live from soccer.” But can you imagine a little more?
Florencia Bonsegundo with number 15 and Mariana Larroquete with 19.
The team’s defeat against Italy in their debut may not be seen as a failure. Didn’t Messi’s team start losing in Qatar? An illusion is expected from this team and a story that fits very well with that illusion is that of Paula Bolaños, a girl who last year played for the Cañuelas Soccer Club with a team made up of boys in the Buenos Aires League. When she turned 10 years old, from the League they considered that she could not continue there because they were facing a competitive tournament for men. Paula had to postpone her desire and her illusion of playing until the women’s leagues appeared, perhaps until she was 13 or 14 years old. The same men who played with her -who were also friends- could continue playing. The icing on the cake was that the League sanctioned the Club and took away their points because Paula didn’t stop playing.
A few years later, Paula has her album of figurines of this 2023 World Cup, plays in a women’s soccer league and is very passionate about the national team: “There are some games that I did not see because they are very early, I really like the stories of the players who started playing since they were little” says Paula, who is also a fan of players from other countries like Marta from Brazil or Linda from Colombia.
The horizon began to expand like an avalanche that quickly found its bottleneck and piled up at the master’s door: just as Barbie fights against the patriarchy, women’s football is also capable of empowering women and turning them into women in the blink of an eye. a product, a brand or a slogan. The Ezeiza property already has changing rooms for women, semi-professionalization is a fact and the AFA has a Department of Equity and Gender. Rapporteurs, journalists, commentators and female soccer players began to form part of that exclusive firmament for cis masculinities. What is necessary to imagine so that all the Paulis can dream of playing in a World Cup? What structures of neighborhood football, of the club, of camaraderie, of friendship, do we need to recover? How important is it to dismantle the gender binary and play at exchanging illusion for product?
Bonus track: what is talked about
In the World Cups, we don’t only talk about football: it was seen in Qatar that between matches the social networks were blazing with the large group of friends that had made up the players of the national team: the jokes they made among themselves, the dances in the changing rooms and the backstage of a bond that – they said – was the secret of success.
In the female version there is also gossip but with certain flattens. In this first week of the World Cup there were three events, two at the local level and one more internationalist that caught the attention of social networks: Yamila Rodriguez, the Argentine striker, was accused of being “anti Messi” for having a tattoo on the leg of Cristiano Ronaldo. A manual sample of how the antagonism between soccer players works and the question that fits: Why does Yamila have to be inspired by Lionel and not by Cristiano? To her attacks, she replied that she “was having a very bad time” and “that she never said that she was anti Messi.”
But the attacks on women who are taking part in the World Cup transcended the players, as was the case with Angela Lerena, who near the end of the national team’s debut match against Italy said about the Italian soccer player Cristiana Girelli: “She grew up in a pharmacy and we vaccinated. Is it wrong? The joke or comment received a huge barrage of criticism: “they throw her out”, “she doesn’t comment anymore”, “how rude”. Is it the joke – well accomplished or not – that bothers? Or is it “that the women don’t have an opinion about football” hasn’t lost its validity yet?
The third event is linked to the headlines of a sports newspaper where they highlighted the “confrontations” between lesbian courtships between players who played for different teams. Although on the one hand this approach leaves aside the models of traditional footballer families, on the other it emphasizes the conflicts that can lead to two girls being girlfriends. In another note from the same newspaper -to continue with the novel- they detail the scene in which two players supposedly did not greet each other before the game began: “He denied him the greeting because he went out with his ex-girlfriend” Isn’t the way to update yourself to the lesbian romances that are common in women’s soccer a bit far-fetched?
Questions for the future, wishes for a sport impregnated in the skins of this territory and fantasies for a different kind of football that can sneak into the cracks left by the market and make stories like Pauli’s or like those of the girls on the national team.
2023-07-28 04:39:06
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