A construção de um habitus de luta no futebol de mulheres: estudo de caso de uma equipe situada no estado do Paraná.

Abstract

The role of women players in the professional soccer field is still incipient, unstable, and unconsolidated. In view of the progress in the professional performance of women in this field, it is necessary that soccer entities (confederations, federations, and clubs) develop actions to ensure greater sustainability of women's soccer. In 2016, in its Club License Regulations, CONMEBOL demanded that teams competing in the men's Brazilian Championship - series A, invest in a women's department. In this sense, the entities established the year 2019 as the deadline for adaptation to the new measure, in which the requesting club should have a main team or make a partnership agreement with some women's team already structured. Based on this scenario, the objective of this study was to analyze the position of women players of the "Club A - Club B" team in the professional soccer field after the aforementioned measure established by CONMEBOL in 2016. To achieve the research results, a Case Study was conducted with the aforementioned team, which competed in the A1 series of the Brazilian Women's Soccer Championship in 2019. The case study was conducted through a field diary and semistructured interviews applied to sixteen female players and the team's coach/manager. The narratives of these interviewed agents were analyzed based on the methodological assumptions of Content Analysis, proposed by Bardin (1979). We noticed that the position of the female player in the soccer field is constituted from her social trajectory, which goes through some phases: insertion, permanence and professionalization. Although these phases correspond to distinct moments, it was observed that a habitus of struggle (combative) was internalized and subsidized the trajectory of these women, to the extent that they needed to constantly contest the cultural gender prejudice in order to subvert the social symbolic, as well as to tense the logic and the existing power relations within their soccer career. The players' projects show the aspirations of professionalization and recognition of professional performance, however, they emphasize the limitations for this, especially with regard to the conditions provided by the club and the lack of formalization of contracts between club and player. Therefore, the actions promoted by soccer entities, more specifically the CONMEBOL measure, had a positive impact by bringing opportunities for a larger number of women in soccer, but did not guarantee improvements in the conditions of players' performance, as well as did not remit the professionalization of women's soccer, especially for teams with low symbolic capital, such as Club A/Club B, located outside the major soccer centers.