When Football is Feminine! Soccer, Women and Society

Introduction: soccer, women and society

Kausik Bandyopadhyay

Part I - Women at Play: Transition, Professionalization and Migration in Women’s Soccer

1. Dimensions of professionalization: a comparative analysis of women’s soccer in the United States and Poland

Radosław Kossakowski and Rachel Allison

2. Bonsucesso Futebol Clube, undefeated youth champion of 1983: Rio de Janeiro’s suburbs as breeding grounds for women’s soccer in Brazil

Rosana da Câmara Teixeira, Leda Maria da Costa and Lívia Gonçalves Magalhães

3. Professionalization of women’s football in Brazil: perspectives and challenges in athletes’ working conditions

Gabriela Borel Delarmelina, Letícia Carvalho de Souza and Mariana Zuaneti Martins

4. Soccer, women, society: contextualizing women’s football growth in East Africa

Wycliffe W. Simiyu Njororai

5. The talent pathways of professional and international female soccer players in the United States

Matthew Andrew, Patrick Mannix, Rick Cost and José M. Oliva-Lozano

6. Multi-club networks in women’s soccer: reproducing hierarchies under the promise of integration

Jean-Michel De Waele and Jonathan Ferreira

7. Sport as migrant work: transnational athletic migration and belonging in English professional women’s football

Neha Dhaliwal, Paul Darby and Katie Liston

8. Beyond the pitch: migration, communication, culture, and chastity in Nigerian women’s football

Chuka Onwumechili and Unwana Samuel Akpan

Part II - Playing on/off the Field: Women’s Role, Agency and Empowerment

9. The Australian Matildas at FIFA 2023: spurring social change, sports policy and soft power diplomacy

Binoy Kampmark

10. Game changers? The Matildas and 2023 Women’s World Cup

Thomas Heenan, Sam Duncan and Lucas Santos

11. Thirty-two years of inequality in coaching at the FIFA Women’s World Cup (1991–2023): do gender, race and region matter?

Maria Eduarda Lima Sampaio and Júlia Barreira

12. Coaching expectations among women in Germany’s amateur soccer leagues

Nele Grauert and Matheus Galdino

13. Women in club presidency: masculinities and power in Brazilian football politics

Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui and Letícia Marcolan

14. Disrupting the doxa: how women leaders in soccer facilitate other women on their career paths – a Bourdieusian perspective

Niklas Lütgerodt, Charlotte Kirschbaum and Swantje Scharenberg

Part III - The Gendered Field of Play: Femininity, Motherhood and Patriarchy

15. Sport, society, and gender: a Confucian perspective on North Korean women’s football

Sudhakar Vaddi

16. Soccer, society and motherhood: mothers, daughters and tackling gender norms

Hanya Pielichaty and Philippa Velija

17. Mexican women’s football philosophy: lesbian visibility, public motherhood and collective effervescence

Gabriela Eugenia Ríos Infante

18. Five dollars and a dress: gendered dynamics and the politics of funding Zimbabwe’s ‘Mighty Warriors’

Manase Kudzai Chiweshe

19. Plain sexism or misogyny? gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and a non-consensual kiss

Christos Kassimeris

20. Do Brazilian women football players consider themselves feminists? Approaches to gender equality and empowerment

Chellsea Hortêncio Alcântara, Mariana Zuaneti Martins, Carine Collet, João Cláudio Braga Pereira Machado and Larissa Rafaela Galatti

21. Women’s football in Iran: resistance through circumstances

Caroline Azad

Biography

Kausik Bandyopadhyay is Professor of History at West Bengal State University, Kolkata, India. Formerly a Fellow of the International Olympic Museum, Lausanne, and of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata, he is also Executive Academic Editor of Soccer and Society (Routledge).