It’s a tough look:
Wagner Xavier is an anthropologist at the University of Campinas who studies gender and sport and explains why Brazil took 47 years to form a women’s blind national team. While the men’s national championships started in 1978, the women’s national team was only officially established in 2025. He says the delay happened because for decades football was treated as an exclusively male space and women with disabilities faced a double barrier of gender and disability prejudice, resulting in a total lack of investment and organised competitions.
Football, he argues, was built as a male space from its foundations – structured that way since the 19th century, when Baron de Coubertin founded the Olympic Games. “Women were considered assistants – in the sense of giving support and watching from the sidelines,” he says. “They were the first fans, but they were there as supporting characters in the process.” The division of domestic labour by gender, he says, “goes into public life too, reaching the most diverse institutions” – including sport.