Opinion – Renata Mendonça: Sports journalism still shows contempt for women’s football

Imagine the following scenario: it’s FIFA’s award day for the best in the world, one of the most talked about events in football. A sports program debates the best player award nominees – Messi, Lewandowski, Salah. The presenter asks the commentators their opinion on the topic. Silence.

I’m among the guests and after a few seconds I reply, “I don’t feel comfortable commenting because I don’t follow.”

A scene that is so surreal, it’s almost unimaginable, right? What would you say about a woman participating in a sports program who doesn’t know how to express an opinion on the main topic of the day in the world of sport, the FIFA award? What would you say if all the commentators at the table couldn’t say anything about this subject at all?

Scenes like this are recurrent when news about women’s football appears on the agenda. And it is worth mentioning that we are in an evolution here, because until recently no one even knew what was happening in this universe. There was no talk about the best player award – except when Marta was among the nominees, then there was not much to escape from – nor about what happened in the women’s team, in the Brazilian Women’s Championship, etc.

Today, thankfully, these issues have gained space. It was an achievement for women, for the right to have a leading role in sports as well. But the contempt for them remains enormous. They even report, but do not give visibility. They even put it on the program’s agenda, but they can’t develop it – unless they call the women on the channel, those, yes, who have the obligation to know how to talk about women’s football.

Really? I always thought that the role of the sports journalist was to inform. That the sports commentator’s role was to debate sports topics with background, information, data. And the role of the sports press would be to report everything that is relevant in the medium. When I chose this profession, I understood the size of its responsibility: basically, it is journalism that “decides” what is relevant enough for people to know.

Last week, the CBF made significant changes to the structure of women’s football. The entity fired Duda Luizelli, then coordinator of women’s teams, and removed Aline Pellegrino from the position of coordinator of women’s competitions to take over her then colleague’s vacancy. It is not yet known who will be in the role that Pellegrino played.

It is as if the CBF had fired Juninho Paulista in the men’s team without giving further explanations. Wouldn’t the theme have had repercussions for days in the sports press? In the case of the news about the women’s team, it had little space/visibility in the major vehicles. And if someone were to walk through their newsrooms asking about the event, I’d bet that 9 out of 10 journalists wouldn’t know anything about it.

They will say that it is difficult to follow everything. That unfortunately there is a general lack of knowledge about women’s football. I would say that ignorance there is synonymous with prejudice. It’s as if the subject is so irrelevant to them that they don’t think it’s necessary to find out about it – leave it to the experts, the women of the house. A contempt that does not match what is learned in the profession: being well informed is the basic thing. Nobody has to know everything, but in the age of Google, “search” is just a click away. It is not so difficult.

This also applies to the lack of knowledge about African football in the African Cup of Nations broadcasts, falling into racist clichés. By the way, speaking of racism, leaf, you become eternally responsible for what you post. Remember that.