Fifty years of women’s football in placar: From disallowed goals to winning at home?

Abstract

Proliferation of sports coverage in the media over recent decades provides rich material through which to explore a range of socio-cultural issues. A growing number of international studies have focused on questions of gender, while in Brazil the focus has been on (men’s) football as the national sport. The success of the women’s national team and the global profile that women’s football has come to enjoy has led to the first considerations of the ways in which the women’s game in Brazil has featured in the country’s printed media, especially since 2000. This study will focus instead on the ways in which women’s football was discussed and represented in the country’s most popular sports magazine during the period when women’s football was formally prohibited in order to understand how the visual and textual discourses that have frequently been used to delegitimise women’s football came to be established.