Only beautiful women need apply : human rights and gender in Brazillian soccer

Soccer in Brazil has always been a ‘man thing’ and historically women were actually excluded from playing it formally until 1979, when the law was repealed. Since then, women have gradually become more prominent in the sport. Despite this, obstructive prejudices still permeate women’s soccer in Brazil, with the most prevalent form of discriminatory marginalization being in relation to their physical appearance. In 2002, one of the biggest sporting bodies in Brazil, the Soccer Federation of Sao Paulo organized a women’s soccer championship with much fanfare and huge television coverage. It was required by the Soccer Federation of Sao Paulo that the players were to be aged between 17 and 23 years old, and preferably were beautiful, white-skinned with blond hair. This paper, which demonstrates how arcane paternalistic concepts of gender in Brazilian soccer still continue to restrain the human rights of women players in the twenty-first century, derived from an ethnographic study conducted involving three semi-structured interviews with three of the players following the FPF championship Ahead of the interviews the FPF cautioned the interviewees, restricting the matters that they could mention to their own sporting history and their thoughts about the games played in the championship. Further the players were told that if they disparaged the organization and conduct of the competition or soccer in Brazil per se their teams would lose competition points. Despite this the interviews revealed that the male hegemony that rules Brazilian soccer is rife with discrimination, racism and the sexualization of women players