Thinking about women’s soccer: the partnership between Athletico Paranaense and Foz Cataratas (2019)

Abstract

The aim of this text is to analyze the conditions in which women players from the Foz Cataratas team can play football after the association with the Athletico Paranaense club in 2019. To this end, we opted for a case study carried out through observations and semi-structured interviews applied to fourteen female players and the manager. The narratives were analyzed using the methodology known as Content Analysis (Bardin, 1979). It was found that the actions promoted by soccer organizations had a positive impact by bringing opportunities to a greater number of women, but did not guarantee improvements in the playing conditions of the players and did not lead to the professionalization of women’s soccer, especially for teams with low symbolic capital, located outside the soccer centers.