Brazil’s Marta gestures during the women’s Group C soccer match between Nigeria and Brazil at the Bordeaux stadium during the 2024 Summer Olympics. (AP)
In the raised right hand of Espen Eksas, Marta saw the end of her unfulfilled football dream in Paris. The Brazilian, a six-time world footballer of the year, one of the greatest forwards in the game, had flung her left foot dangerously close to Olga Carmona’s head in a group game against Spain. The referee brandished a red card, a deserving one despite the protests that soon became begging, Spain went onto win the game, pushing Brazil to the brink of an exit. At 38, Marta had specified that this would be her Olympics farewell.
But Marta did not lose hope. She must have told herself what she always did: “You’ve already fought, Marta. You’re stronger than you realise.” She had said in another context: “I never give up hope. If I had, I wouldn’t be playing football.” As fate would wink on her, Brazil snuck into the quarterfinal on better goal difference, then scraped past hosts France and face Spain in the semifinal. The match could be her last, but she would be the last one to forsake hope. Marta, of course, would be back, and her teammates are determined to help the legend kiss the medal that has always eluded her. Twice she came close, in 2004 and 2008, when she consoled herself with silver. Gabi Portilho, the goalscorer against France would say after the game: “We have just one dream, to realise the dream of Marta. Without her, we wouldn’t be here.”
A fan displays a banner with the portrait of Brazil’s Marta during the women’s Group C soccer match between Nigeria and Brazil at the Bordeaux stadium during the 2024 Summer Olympics. (AP)
She was not alluding to Marta’s contribution in them reaching within the distance of gold, but her role in uplifting the women’s game in the country. Brazil could be football’s romantic abode, but it had banned women from playing the game for four decades, till 1979. Even after the ban was lifted, women were discouraged from embracing the sport that was the country’s identity. Marta, growing up near the cane-cutting county of Dois Riachos, 1600 kilometres north of Rio de Janeiro, was told football was meant for boys. Her elder brother beat her up for playing with his friends; a coach of an opposite club refused to let his team take the field because a girl was on the other team. Later he claimed he was concerned about her getting brutally tackled. But Marta wrote in Player’s Tribune that she could see rage seething in his eyes and he threatened: “Take the girl away, so that the boys could play.” From the next year, it became a boys only tournament.
The neighbours would tell her mother, who worked as a labourer in a coffee plantation: “She isn’t normal. It’s odd for a girl to be playing. Why do you let her do that? She is called the man girl.” But her mother was far too perturbed by livelihood realities, so she let Marta be herself. Watching and playing football, barefoot and in oversized jerseys, all through the day.
Brazil’s Marta, center, is congratulated after scoring a goal, which was disallowed, during the women’s Group C soccer match between Nigeria and Brazil at the Bordeaux stadium during the 2024 Summer Olympics. (AP)
Every day she came home crying. But she began to ask herself: “Why would God give me this talent, if no one wants me to play? Use that for strength and motivation. Use it to fight, Marta. Fight against it all — the boys, the people who say you can’t. Fight to be accepted.” From self-questioning arose the decision to secretly leave her hometown and join a rare football club for women in Vasco da Gama, near Rio.
In the drunken revelry of a carnival night, she took the three-day bus ride to the capital, where her sympathetic cousin Robert had arranged for a stay at a friend’s place. All she had was a battered phone thrown away by her brother and some money to sustain two meals a day in her journey. The cousin’s friend gave her a pair of boots, though it was too large for her. It didn’t matter, as she stuffed newspapers at the toe to make them fit. Days and weeks passed on as she waited for some club, any club, to call for trials.
The call finally came, but she froze in the field of city-raised teenagers, who called her bicho do mato, or someone from the woods. There were days when she felt knackered. But the monologues with herself refuelled her. “Let my skills do the talking.” So they did, and three years on, she was wearing the famous canary yellow of her country. Like Pele, Romario, Ronaldo. But she saw a wider responsibility: “I wanted to be the pioneer of change, in my country, in the world.”
Two decades later, she stands as not only a legend of the game, but a path-breaker in women’s football, a metaphor of change in the women’s game in her country and world. She earned a famous nickname, Pele in Skirts, to which she sarcastically replied: “Women don’t play in skirts any longer.” Her career would take her to clubs in Sweden and the USA, she would become one the most recognisable and richest in women’s football, the UN made her a football ambassador and the first trip she volunteered was to the then (2011) poorest country in the world, Sierra Leone. In a charity game for impoverished children by UNESCO, she was the lone female player among Zinedine Zidane, Ronaldo, Robert Pires, Claude Makélélé, Paolo Maldini, Luís Figo and Pavel Nedvěd. She didn’t flinch and only garnished her reputation. She scored 119 goals for her country and 182 for the clubs. But nothing filled her with as much joy as visiting her village after six years, in 2006, since the bus trip. “They welcomed me with tears in their eyes and joy on their faces. That moment would stay with me till the last,” she would emotionally say.
The town, the country and the world anxiously wait for a fitting farewell to one of women’s football’s totemic figures. It could render her career a circularity that it has lacked—it is one of several nearly moments. A defeat, though, wouldn’t tarnish her legacy. But perhaps this time, she wouldn’t muster the courage to tell herself what she had always told herself: “You’ve already fought, Marta. You’re stronger than you realise.”
