THE GAME THAT USED TO MAKE YOU HAPPY IS OVER.
Our female Football (from the moment they joined AFA in 1990, up until the World Cup in the USA in 2003).
CONCLUSIONS.
In its lengthy beginning, back in the nineties, this paper attempted at showing the interest arising from social sciences in thinking about other instances–. These instances, insofar as THE GAME THAT USED TO MAKE YOU HAPPY IS OVER, had to do with sport, twice considered as a lesser subject since, first, it dealt with a topic that was not too valuable in itself for social sciences and, secondly, because it refered to a sport practiced by women. These were the characteristics which female football met, which so far and everywhere had been an exclusively male sport. It was, needless to say, a peculiar and promising fact that was slowly beginning in Argentina, yet had replicated in very different geographies and cultures as an overwhelmingly repeated piece of data in all parts. The quote by Luis Alberto Romero also contributed something, pointing out that questions posed by investigators were being renewed, with which the backbone of the research was changing both in anthropology as well as in sociology, etc. and that new fields and new relationships were coming out of this in order to face up to the new questionings.
It all came down, then, to focusing on a such a popular, masculine and universal sport as football, yet in its most peculiar version: that of female football, which at its first stage we find crossed by a history where playfulness, informality and pre-amateurism are its most salients features. The World Cup played in Italy in 1990 put an end to this stage and as from then this sport leaves behind this infant stage, featuring important imbalances in level with respect to the tradition it had gone through, the development it had reached and the support it had received. Part of this first stage was mirrored in the first interviews held with anonymous players who helped us, with their contribution, to clear up many questions that were overcome thanks to these contributions and to the changes that were taking place. The issue of comparisons is a good example of this aspect. At the beginning, female players tend to measure themselves up with male models in force then (Batistuta, Caniggia, etc.). In the last interviews – conducted mostly with players of the Senior League-, and due to major accomplishments such as their participation in the World Cup, jointly with their intervention in other championships abroad, the universe of comparisons has changed and has grown. Now, for our football players, players like American Mia Hamm, Brazilian Pretinha, or Canadian Charmaine Hooper have a lot of weight, yet there is also important recognition for players of our own National Football team such as captain Marisa Gerez or Rosana Gómez, nicknamed “Zurda” (left-handed), and highly appraised as left wing in Boca Juniors. It is increasingly evident for those of us devoted to studying gender and sport that the subject of the identity of our female football players is a priority, an urgent one I would say. To delve deeply into this knowledge may help us draw out an accurate profile of what this boom in female football is telling us from the selfsame side of the players involved, and to what extent this activity enables a new expression of gender which has not been clearly fathomed so far. The National Sport Department, which among its objectives has set up that of walking along to support the drive and the talent of so many women devoted to this sport, is bound to seek to know more about this sport option and what it means as part of an unrenounceable search for identity which will be nothing more than an additional chapter in the Compendium, Women in sport.
Female football is currently being played all over the world, and this has a lot to do with the support given by FIFA to everything which refers to its organization, its tournaments and the world cups themselves. AFA has obviously accepted this direction, yet their answers have not managed to have this steadily growing movement overcome the huge difficulties they have had since the very beginning.
Female football, according to the voices of its participants, does no reach a category needed to meet the demands which the fact of belonging to the leading football organization in Argentina calls for. Most of the difficulties which hamper the development of this sport relate to the scarce support offered by them to this project, despite the unrelenting statements in its favour that the Federation has been making since the nineties.
We could almost assert that the current situation of female football in Argentina accounts for a fight between the vocation and the willingness seen in players against the institutional resistance and that coming from mass media to create leverage and offer legitimacy to this activity, which has not managed to turn into a major source of resources as it happens with male football.
