“Warriors in cleats” in the struggle for recognition: accounts about prejudice in Brazilian women’s soccer

Abstract

This article aims to describe and analyze reports about the motivations and difficulties faced by female soccer players in Brazil. To that end, we interviewed four players from an amateur soccer club in the city of Curitiba-PR. All players at some point in their careers played for the Brazilian national team. After reviewing the information, we found that prejudice - whether related to gender or to lack of incentive - is recurrent in the interviewees speech, as well as the adjective “warrior” appears at the end of this paper as a innate feature of women who seek the soccer practice and place their professional opportunity in it.