It was not enough that she was beaten and mistreated by her first husband since she was 13 years old. That she even shot him in the arm. Nor that two of her children died of hunger before she became a widow at the age of 21. The powerful, attractive, black and marginal Brazilian singer Elza Soares was to blame for Garrincha he would have broken up his marriage for her, a family breaker. Her extreme genius beat her in public and in private and slept with dozens of women at her whim, but she didn’t care, she was Garrincha. The soccer genius was driving drunk when he crashed the car in which Soares’ mother died. But she still didn’t care because she had armor of two World Cups. However, she, the artist whom louis armstrong had baptized as his musical daughter, he had to flee the country. She was like that Brazil in the 1960s. And that’s still the way football is today. We have those who gang rape women, those who hit their partners, those who harass their employees, those who joke with all that in audios of WhatsApp and those who use macho language in locker rooms and press rooms. A bit of everything, the tip of the iceberg and all the underwater ice.
Robinho, Santiso, Greenwood, Overmars… they continue to count on that part of society that does not want to accept a reality that is obvious to anyone except the machistas. There aren’t that many steps from calling your players sluts and grabbing each other’s balls looking at the stands to staying one afternoon to rape a minor fan in a dark room.
There are only a few days left until March 8, Women’s Day, and it would be interesting if The leaguethe RFEF, the media… let’s think of something so that football helps to travel towards a more egalitarian society. Elza Soares released in 2015, at the age of 85, a single titled Maria da Vila Matilde that she repeats in her chorus: “You will regret raising your hand to me.” It would be a good anthem to play in stadiums about numerous headlines of idols involved in episodes of male violence.