Opinion – Renata Mendonça: Globo will debut narrator and football will have new references for girls

Going through the memories, the oldest I have in football are flashes of the 1994 World Cup. I was five years old. I remember Bebeto celebrating a goal with the gesture of rocking a baby, Romário at his side, Dunga raising the cup and everything to the sound of “it’s over, it’s over, it’s tetra”, by Galvão Bueno.

Penta souvenirs have more detail. I remember lying on the living room floor at 3 am in the height of adolescence, suffering with the Brazil vs England bids and screaming at Ronaldinho Gaúcho’s free kick. It all ended with Cafu 100% Jardim Irene also in the voice of Galvão.

From my team, the memories have the voices of Milton Leite, Cléber Machado, Paulo Soares and I could remember here maybe a dozen more narrators who packed the moments of joy and sadness of the last decades.

For all these references on and off the field, one thing in common: they are all men. I don’t remember seeing a single women’s soccer game in my entire childhood. I can’t recall any female voice narrating the moves of a game as I continued to fall in love with the game that didn’t belong to me.

I think a lot of women will relate to what I’m going to say now. I didn’t recognize myself as a girl in football. On the contrary, I recognized myself as one of them. I wanted to behave like one of them. I wanted to go unnoticed. And then when I heard “wow, you really understand football, you don’t even look like a girl talking”, I was happy. I didn’t want to look like a girl, because girls didn’t belong in that universe.

Do you understand what has been forged for us? A lifetime thinking that we were strangers who wanted to play, cheer, comment on football. Today, I know how strange the world is that doesn’t accept girls in the game. Which prohibits girls from competing in childhood championships. Who thinks that liking dolls or balls depends on the gender, not the incentive.

Honestly, I don’t know how I ended up in this area. Knowing absolutely no female references throughout my childhood, I fell in love with football in that crooked, sexist, homophobic way, which refused to accept me as a part and forced me to disguise it to get through unscathed.

The first women’s soccer game that comes to my mind is the 2007 Pan American final, when I was already in college. My female references in the field and outside it were only introduced to me in my professional life, in the last decade.

That’s when I see the news that Globo will broadcast for the first time an official women’s club competition (the Supercopa do Brasil, now in February) and that a narrator will debut for the first time in more than 50 years of the network’s history (Renata Silveira will narrate tournament games on open TV), her eyes fill with tears.

If I and so many of us grew up in love with this game even with everything playing against it, even with the world saying that this was not our place, imagine how the new generation of girls will come, those who will turn on the television on a Sunday and at the right time. Will they see themselves there, on the field, outside of it, in the broadcast booth and in the stands?

I remember that not long ago, in 2015, when I learned that there was a Brazilian Women’s Championship, I went to get information about the games to watch and found out that they were not broadcast. The results were barely out in the table published on the CBF website.

Seven years later, there are women’s soccer games almost weekly on open, closed TV, on more than one channel. They finally became the game’s protagonists. The impact of this change will only be understood in the future. In the meantime, let the girl play.