Marta Vieira da Silva is a legend in women's football.
She holds the record for the most goals scored at the Women's World Cup, and is the only woman to have been named the world's best footballer five times.
Yet, when she recounts how her passion for football started, she tears up. “She is not normal” was something she often heard from her neighbours, because she was the only girl who played football in Dois Riachos, a town in north-eastern Brazil.
Years later, Marta does not feel bitter – had she not come up against such hostility, she says, she may have never left her hometown, and her career may not have developed like it did.
I recently spent time with Marta while filming The Beautiful Game for Girls (a film I made with colleagues Mariangela Maturi and Claudia Jardim), a documentary about the struggles women face to make it and be respected in the football world. Speaking to Marta, one of the most accomplished players in the game, gave me insight into the harassment that girls have to face from a young age when they dare to break into a male-dominated world such as football.
As three women journalists with experience reporting on politics and gender, among other issues, football seemed like a light topic initially.
Women don't even have the right to vote or to walk by themselves in some parts of the world, so why look into something so seemingly superfluous as the right to play football? We soon realised that Marta's childhood story is not uncommon, and that by asking if and why a community allows girls to fulfill their dreams of becoming footballers, we can learn a lot about how that society views women.
FIFA says football is the most popular sport among women, with some 30 million playing it worldwide. Yet, only 23 per cent of FIFA member countries have staff dedicated to women's football and the gender pay gap is more entrenched in football than in politics, business, medicine and space exploration.
The issue is not simply that commercial revenues are much lower for women's games. Even for national teams, where it is up to the state to decide how to remunerate the players, women earn less than men. 35 per cent of national team players don’t receive any compensation for representing their country, according to a recent survey by World's Players Union FIFPro. Many countries, such as Italy, do not recognise women footballers as professionals. A great majority of women need to have a second job in order to sustain their professional football careers.
There is discrimination even when it comes to media coverage: only 4 per cent of sports media content is dedicated to women’s sport and only 12 per cent of sports news is presented by women, according to UNESCO.
Australia is bidding to host the 2023 Women’s World Cup, and The Matildas have launched an online campaign called #Imagine2023. As we enjoy the Men's World Cup in Russia, what do we imagine for the Women's World Cups coming up in 2019 and in 2023? Can the beautiful game become more inclusive?
Women's football has come a long way, in many cases thanks to organised fights. In 2017, the Danish team sat out a World Cup qualifier, Argentinian players went on strike, the Irish and Swedish national teams threatened to miss matches in order to negotiate better deals, and several Brazilian players resigned from the national team in protest. In some countries, the fight paid off. National teams in Australia, Holland, the United States, Denmark, Sweden and Scotland signed new deals with their national associations. Norway became the first national federation to implement an equal pay deal for men and women, and in 2018 New Zealand followed suit.
But Marta believes that all the problems boil down to the same issue: prejudice.
“Sexism appears, there is a bias that women are not competent. If people don't accept what you are doing, they will not watch your games, you will not have an audience,” she tells me.
“We don't have a magic wand to change all of this. We have to do it by fighting, setting an example to inspire children, so that new generations can accept women's football as something natural.”
Imagining 2023, what are the biases that need changing?
