Brazil legend Marta, 38, is set to retire from international football after the 2024 Olympic Games this month, but what legacy has she left on the women’s game? We spoke to those who know her best to tell the story of her incredible career.
Information from ESPN Brasil was used in his piece.
1. Long before she became the best women’s soccer player in the world, Marta was seven years old, the only girl playing on a dirt field in Brazil. The games were played in a dry creek, the goals forged from three sticks to make both posts and a crossbar.
She had grown up in poverty, playing without shoes, then later stuffing newspaper into the bottom of her used boots to make them fit. Her single mother had worked long hours to provide for her and three siblings. But she would dribble and weave with the ball like it was tied to her foot.
“She was born to play futebol,” her childhood coach, Tota, tells ESPN.
Born to? Everyone says that now, but supposed to? Definitely not. There were always comments. “She can’t play, she’s a girl,” they often said. Some even asked her mother why she let her play, insisting: “She’s not normal.”
Her mother shook the questions off. As did her childhood coach, Tota. He got the same questions all the time, none more so than during a children’s tournament in the neighbouring town of Santana do Ipanema. The details are slightly lost to time now, but the crux is this: Marta arrived at the competition she had played in before, but this time it was a problem.
A coach from another team said his team wouldn’t play against her, with the organiser eventually removing her from the tournament. (The organiser later told Brazilian media he only did so to protect her, after another player had threatened to injure her when she had nutmegged him.) The following year, it was made a boys-only competition.
2. As detailed in a Players’ Tribune piece written to her 14-year-old self in 2017, one of the biggest decisions in Marta’s life was whether to get on a bus. It would pick her up near Dois Riachos in the West of the Brazilian state of Alagoas and take her to Rio de Janeiro, a three-day journey. At the other end was the chance of a trial at a professional club, Vasco da Gama, who were one of the best sides in Brazil at the time.
Marta’s issue was that she was shy. She stood at the bus stop feeling nervous. It was one of those crossroad moments in her life: Stay where you are, or bet on yourself.
When it arrived, she hesitated for a moment, then boarded.
In Rio, the first thing to do was an interview with Vasco’s women’s football coordinator Helena Pacheco.
“I asked her if she had ever played football,” Pacheco tells ESPN, to which Marta said she had only played on small pitches.
“I asked if she had any material [jersey, boots, etc.].” Marta just shook her head.
But what Marta didn’t say with her mouth, she said with her eyes. While they spoke, Pacheco says that Marta’s eyes remained fixated on the ball at a match going on nearby: “I turned to my assistant coach, Marcos, and said: ‘Wow, this girl looks like she’s going to play ball really well.’ He said: ‘Oh, Helena, you’re exaggerating, aren’t you?’ Then I said: ‘She didn’t take her eyes off the ball.'”
The trial was the next day. At first, Marta looked unsure of what to do on the pitch. She looked at how others were stretching and imitated them herself in a half-sure kind of way. But when a ball was introduced, Marta began expressing herself in a way she hadn’t done before.
“Then she started hitting the ball, we began to see that she had skill. She hit the ball well,” Pacheco says.
Her first shot knocked the goalkeeper to the floor. Her next few shots were similarly powerful, hurting the goalkeeper’s hands.
Pacheco turned back to her assistant. “I smiled at Marcos and said: ‘I think I’m right,” she says.
3.1. Marta soon joined Vasco after the trial and moved into the club’s youth accommodation under the stands of the stadium. By 2002, Marta was invited to join the Brazil national youth setup, making her tournament debut at 16 years old at the Under-20 World Cup in Canada.
It was around that time when she first met Formiga, who would go on to play 234 times for Brazil. In their first training session together, Formiga couldn’t believe the energy she was bringing. Marta arrived and instantly said: “Let’s train, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”
“And off she went with her little neck poking out onto the pitch, running around,” Formiga tells ESPN. “I thought ‘Mercy! My God, where are you going, woman, like that? All fired up.'”
When the training session was over, the majority of the players headed inside, leaving only the goalkeeper to run through a few drills. Marta wasn’t heading inside, though. She often would stay with the goalkeepers after training to practice her shooting. Later on, those extracurricular sessions sometimes took on a different vibe.
She would stay with the goalkeepers at the end [of training],” Formiga says. “‘How many goals do you want? Let’s have a bet — the winner gets coconut water.’ And she stayed there with the goalkeepers. Teasing, making fun of them.”
Most of the time she won, but there were times when she lost, too. “Then the goalkeepers would make fun of her,” Formiga adds. “And she had to pay for it [the bet], too.”
Marta’s career at Vasco ended in 2002 when the club folded — the first of many times she would endure the experience of being made redundant when the women’s football structures around her crumbled.
4.1. Marta’s debut at the Women’s World Cup came in the United States in 2003. Most of the players, coaches and fans outside of Brazil had never heard of her. She was a slight, diminutive 17-year-old, and yet, 14 minutes into her tournament debut vs. South Korea she scored a penalty. She netted again in their next group game, a 4-1 win over Norway, and scored another penalty in the round-of-16 exit to Sweden.
Her performances soon garnered wide acclaim, none more so than from Pelé, who had starred as a 17-year-old himself for the men’s team at the 1958 World Cup before going on to become arguably the greatest player of all time.
A nickname was formed: “Pelé with a skirt.” Pelé himself endorsed it, but it never quite suited. Marta, like the rest of Brazil, loved Pelé but thought it was wrong to be compared to a male footballer. That, and women’s players don’t wear skirts.
“Nobody likes having a male nickname,” Pacheco says. “Although it was a positive thing because people didn’t know how to say ‘You’re very good,’ so they’d compare you to Pelé.”
4.2. Marta’s actual nickname among the squad was “Zefa.” It was because of her likeness to Brazilian marathon runner Maria Zeferina Baldaia.
“I didn’t come up with it [the nickname]. I swear to god, you can ask her, I didn’t come up with it,” Formiga says. “Zeferina Baldaia’s TV special was on. I looked at it. The girls said: ‘Wow, she [Marta] looks like Zefa’ … Then it started. ‘Zeferina, Zeferina, Baldaia, Zeferina.’ It’s a good thing she didn’t care too much because otherwise people would have gone on and on. I think the only people who ever call her that are me and Cristiane.”
5.1. Roland Arqvist was at the 2003 Women’s World Cup to watch Sweden and scout for new players. He was a sporting director at Umea — a Premier Division (Damallsvenskan) club in a town of just over 100,000 people in northern Sweden — and had been taken aback at Marta’s play at the tournament. “Her balance, speed and technique are something that I had never seen in a women’s football player. Never,” Arqvist tells ESPN.
Upon returning home from the tournament, he told one of the coaches about the 17-year-old Brazilian and how he wanted for her to play for Umea next season. They had just won their third straight league title and were the reigning European champions. With Marta, he fancied their chances at more silverware.
“I remember that he just laughed at me,” Arqvist says. “So many people told me that I was totally crazy. How could I think that this could happen and work? I mean, she was a very young player from Brazil and me taking her to a cold part of northern Sweden to play football, it was crazy. So many people told me this is not going to work.”
Arqvist trusted what he saw at the World Cup and tried anyway. The bigger issue was trying to contact Marta in the first place. Back in 2003, Marta didn’t have a mobile phone or email. Arqvist says it took two months to get a phone number for a telephone kiosk.
They arranged a time for Marta to be at the other end of the line. It was 2 a.m. in Sweden when they spoke.
Marta thought it was a joke. “F— off,” she said.
Until then, no Brazilian women’s player had played outside of Brazil. When Marta went to Pacheco with the news that a Swedish side wanted to sign her, Pacheco was as concerned as Marta was.
“At first I was very afraid because I thought it might be trafficking,” Pacheco says. “I went to see the contract, saw that it was in English, and made some changes that included her having English lessons. Then the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) reassured me that it was true, the club there was a very reputable club and that there was no problem. I gave her lots of advice, telling her never to let go of her passport. She went, and we hugged a lot before she left.”
5.2 If you wanted to know just how strange Marta found the new land she had just arrived in, you’d need only look at her feet. In February 2004, she landed in snow-covered Sweden wearing flip-flops. As the plane touched down in Stockholm, the 17-year-old looked out the window and wondered if it was even possible to play football there. The clock said it was the afternoon and the sun had already set. It had been a particularly harsh winter that year and the snow was everywhere.
“What am I doing here?” she thought to herself.
Arqvist met her and a friend — who had been signed by a different local club and would stay with her too — for the first time at the flight gate. Arqvist introduced her to Odin Barbosa, the man whose family would host Marta during her first year and who spoke Portuguese.
Arqvist got her to wear a Umea jersey. And then, just after leaving the flight gate, her first news conference was scheduled to take place right at the airport.
Marta said that moving to Sweden was the best decision she could have made.
6. Marta’s stay at the Barbosa house would support her during a spell in her life when she was far from home.
“They gave her lifts to and from training because my Mum and Dad lived about 20 minutes outside of Umea,” Barbosa’s daughter, Josefin, tells ESPN. “So they were out all day just driving her back and forth and preparing food and washing her laundry. She was young, she’s never been doing that. She was a child.”
Marta was quickly seen as part of the family. “She became like their daughter,” Josefin adds. Every Easter, the Barbosa family would get together to play games; Marta, with her famous competitive spirit, joined in even if she was at a serious disadvantage. One of the games was simple: Each person had to cross-country ski up to a certain place, use a flame there to light a candle, then delicately bring it back without letting it go out. The first to return would be the winner.
Marta, who grew up in a place where the weather almost never drops below 20 degrees Celsius (69 degrees Fahrenheit), started putting on her skis. She’d never skied before, but that didn’t matter.
“We went to do all this stuff and she always wanted to win,” Josefin says. “That’s how she is. She had never skied before, but she wasn’t afraid.”
7.1. Marta became an established global superstar after just one year in Sweden. She scored a reported 22 goals in her first season — joint-top scorer in the Swedish top-flight and helped the side to win the 2004 UEFA Women’s Cup (the predecessor to the Women’s Champions League) with three goals in the two-legged final win [8-0 on aggregate] against Frankfurt. She maintained contact with Pacheco via email. One day, the exchange went like this:
Marta: “Helena, I think I’m going to be nominated for the FIFA World Player of the Year award in women’s football.”
Pacheco: “You’re going to be nominated, but you’re not going to win”
Marta: “But how can I not win, Helena?”
Pacheco: “Marta, you’ve been nominated, but the girl from the United States was the Olympic champion, she should be nominated. Then the second time round you’ll be the best in the world.”
Marta: “Are you saying this just to cheer me up?”
Pacheco: “No, I’m saying it because it’s true. You were the top scorer in Europe, but the girl was the Olympic champion, so she’ll win ahead of you. Next time you’ll win.”
Marta was third that year behind Germany’s Birgit Prinz and the USWNT’s Mia Hamm. The following year, she came second, again behind Prinz. But she won the award for the first time in 2006 before going on to win it five times in a row between 2006 and 2010, then again in 2018.
7.2. At the award show in 2004, Marta, still only 18 years old and 5-foot-4, asked Odin if he would accompany her. She wanted a friendly face there with her. “It was quite luxurious,” his daughter Josefin tells ESPN.
They flew First Class — neither of them had done that before — landing in Zurich, Switzerland for FIFA’s awards gala. When they got to the hotel, Barbosa quickly realised he had never stayed in a hotel before, either.
“He didn’t know how to turn on the lights because you have to put the card in the cardholder,” Josefin says. “People at the awards thought he was a Swedish referee.”
It was Marta’s first time walking among the greats of the sport. Barcelona and Brazil legend Ronaldinho won the men’s award that year. Marta was overjoyed to be able to meet one of her idols, but was too shy to say much.
8. Athens 2004 was Marta’s first Olympics Games, and alongside Cristiane and Formiga she helped Brazil reach the final. The USWNT held out for a 2-1 victory in extra-time, but Brazil and Marta, who had to settle for silver, left a lasting impression.
“I just remember all of us on the U.S. team being like ‘man, they’re going to be the team that we need to watch,” USWNT star Shannon Boxx tells ESPN. “We were holding on and that was it. I mean we had to double team Marta. Every time she got the ball, we double teamed her.
“I think the U.S. team at that point had this ability to just keep pushing for 90 minutes where every other team kind of faltered at the 70th.”
9.1. Moving to Sweden changed Marta’s life. For the first time, she had seen women’s football taken seriously, with a proper league structure and sold-out stadiums when she played. By 2006, after winning the World Player of the Year award, she had gained respect in Brazil, too. Even in her hometown of Dois Riachos.
When she first returned to Dois Riachos after winning the award, there were crowds there to welcome her home. She was paraded around town on a fire truck. Just five years after from being told she shouldn’t play football because of her gender, Marta was back. The crowd applauded.
9.2 Today, when you drive into Dois Riachos, there is a sign that reads: “BEM VINDO A DOIS RIACHOS TERRA DA JOGADORA MARTA”
In English, it reads: “WELCOME TO THE HOME OF MARTA.”
10. If you took snapshots of the best moments from Marta’s life and career, then standing in the tunnel of the Maracanã stadium in Rio before Brazil’s 2007 Pan Am Games final against the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) would certainly be one. Brazil’s men had crashed out in the group stage and that left the hopes of the football-mad nation on the shoulders of its women’s side.
When the players emerged from the tunnel, there were over 70,000 in the crowd waiting to watch them — the biggest attendance the team had ever managed back home in Brazil.
“We only realised the magnitude of what was happening when we left the dressing room,” Marta, whose star power had helped attract so many fans, later said.
The USWNT fielded an U20s side which featured future stars such as Alyssa Naeher, Tobin Heath and Kelley O’Hara. Still, Brazil overran the Americans in a convincing fashion. Marta scored the opening two goals from the penalty spot in a 5-0 victory and ended the tournament with 12 goals from five games.
One fan held up a sign that read: “I never saw Pelé, but I have seen Marta.”
It cemented her place among Brazil’s football legends. Days after the final, aged just 21, she was invited to leave her footprints in cement at the Maracanã. She was the youngest-ever player to receive the honour (men’s star Kaká became the second-youngest to do so the following year aged 26.)
“I have had many great moments, the silver medal at the Olympics the honour of best player but this was a very special day,” Marta said at the ceremony. “It shows to the country that women’s football can and does have potential.”
11.1 It’s hard to overstate just how much of a shock the 2007 Women’s World Cup semifinal was. The USWNT were the reigning Olympic Champions and on a 51-game unbeaten run; yet, entering the 78th minute of the match, they were 3-0 down and living a nightmare.
“This one played out like a Stephen King novel for the U.S.,” the ESPN announcer had said at half-time.
Marta had run riot. An early own goal had given Brazil the lead before Marta scored a superb solo effort to double their advantage; Boxx was sent off on the cusp of half-time, then Cristiane added a third from a well-timed Marta assist.
Marta was so dominant that, rather than chase a comeback, USWNT head coach Greg Ryan brought on their fastest player, Tina Ellertson, to mark her one-on-one. But it still didn’t work.
As the 80th minute arrived, Marta danced through some more U.S. players to perform her best trick yet. Receiving the ball on the right corner of the Americans’ 18-yard box with her back to goal, she flicked the ball one side of Ellertson and bolted round the other before beating another player and firing into the net under goalkeeper Briana Scurry. It would go down as one of the best goals in Women’s World Cup history.
“I think the defenders must be looking for her to this day,” Formiga tells ESPN.
It was Brazil’s fourth goal and secured them a place in the World Cup final for the first time. It was also the worst World Cup defeat in USWNT history.
11.2. In the dressing room afterwards, Marta wasn’t quick to lap up any plaudits. “She gets shy [after a great goal], as incredible as it may seem, because we’re like:’ Well done, Zefa!’ And she’s like: ‘Get out of here, it’s OK. It’s over, it’s over,” Formiga says.
“She has this side to her too, of getting flustered at moments like that, you know? She knows how important that game was, that goal and everything. But for us there, she’s always been very shy about things.”
12.1. The final took place three days later. At the hour mark, Brazil were 1-0 down against Germany, but Cristiane won a penalty and Marta stepped up to take it. She stood, took some deep breaths, then looked down at the ball and fired it into the bottom left-hand corner. When she looked up, though, Germany goalkeeper Nadine Angerer had dived at an amazing speed to the same side to push the ball away.
Germany went on to score again and secured a 2-0 victory. “After the penalty save, I felt it was meant to be,” Germany coach Silvia Neid said afterwards. “It was important to work against Marta. We did a good job in pushing her to the sidelines.”
At 21 years old, Marta had already lost an Olympic and Women’s World Cup final.
12.2. A year later, the USWNT and Brazil met again, this time in the 2008 Olympic final. It was another chance for Marta to finally claim some major silverware. Only, it didn’t work out that way. The U.S., led by coach Pia Sundhage, were much more resolute and nullified Marta’s threat before a belting strike from Carli Lloyd in extra time sealed them a gold medal.
Afterwards, Marta sobbed. Her lip was quivering when she spoke in a TV interview.
“I have no idea why we can’t win a final,” she said. “It’s something I’m gonna keep asking myself for a long time. You keep asking what you did wrong.”
12.3. Three finals; three defeats. It takes a toll on the Brazil players, even now.
“It’s tough, man, tough,” Formiga tells ESPN. “I cry, it’s hard losing a World Cup, losing the Olympics, any championship. But sometimes I think about things that happened at the beginning, that’s what makes me angry.”
Brazil’s lack of investment from the CBF left a lasting effect on the team. It was noticed by other teams too.
“We always said that if they got together as much as we did, this would be an entirely different competition between the two of us,” Boxx tells ESPN. “It was still difficult, but it was almost like we were like, gosh, man, if they had gotten the backing that we had as a U.S. team, this could have been a very dangerous team that won a lot of big events.”
How does Marta reckon with those defeats?
“She cries for everyone,” Formiga says. “You see all the interviews, she’s always crying, she’s a very emotional girl. For anything. If I tell her a story, ask for advice, ‘this happened, there’s something in the family,’ she starts crying. Before you’ve finished talking, her eyes are full of tears. She’s very human.”
13.1. In 2008, Marta was invited by the United Nations (UN) to play in a charity game in Fez, Morocco called the “Match Against Poverty” alongside other legends like Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo Nazário. She was the only female player invited. In fact, she was the only female player ever to be invited.
Her appearance actually made history, as Marta became the first woman to play in a FIFA-sanctioned men’s game.
She played again in 2014, this time against BSC Young Boys in Bern, Switzerland with proceeds going to typhoon victims in the Philippines. That day, she lined up alongside a host of the sport’s legends: Zidane, Ronaldo, Robert Pires, Claude Makélélé, Paolo Maldini, Luís Figo and Pavel Nedvěd.
Just like her childhood on the dirt pitches of Dois Riachos, she was the only female player. Aziyade Poltier-Mutal, who organised the match for the UN, remembers watching as Marta came off the bench and changed the game. First, she assisted Zidane, then laid one on for Christian Vieri.
“Everybody said she was the best player that day,” she tells ESPN.
13.2. In 2011, Marta was in a meeting with members of the UN, who were planning her next ambassadorial trip. She turned to one official and said: “I want to go to the poorest country in the world.”
So the UN officials crunched the numbers. At that time, it was between Niger and Sierra Leone, and soon she was headed for the latter. Upon arrival, Marta decided they should put on a women’s football match and that she would coach. “Her message all the time was: ‘Nothing’s impossible. Take my example,'” Poltier-Mutal says.
To this day, if ever Poltier-Mutal meets someone from Sierra Leone, she’ll mention the trip she took with Marta. Often, they’ll say they remember the visit. She later learned there are framed pictures of Marta on the walls of bars across the country.
14. By 2015, Marta had become something of a domestic footballing nomad. She left Umea in 2008 when the club began to endure intense financial struggles. Her next club, LA Soul in the newly formed Women’s Professional Soccer league (WPS) lasted just a year before financial difficulties cut her stay short there, too. The same situation happened at FC Gold Pride (2010) and Western New York Flash (2011). By that time she was a five-time World Player of the Year, but again without a club.
She moved back to Sweden to join Tyresö in 2012, and alongside U.S. legend Christen Press, helped them to the UEFA Women’s Champions League final, only to see the club face financial headwinds and go without pay. Rather than move to mainland Europe, she opted for a six-month contract at Swedish side Rosengård, where she eventually stayed for three years before moving to NSWL side Orlando Pride in 2017.
It wasn’t just Marta, though — all the players on those teams faced that feeling of the ground moving beneath their feet.
“Every year it [the club] ended,” Boxx, who played for 10 different clubs herself in her career, says after learning of Marta’s club history. “I was like: ‘Am I the curse?’ To hear that Marta also went through that same thing makes me feel like it wasn’t just me.”
15. Brazil endured more heartbreak at the 2011 and 2015 Women’s World Cups, departing both at the quarterfinal stage. By the 2016 Olympic Games on home soil, Marta was 29 years old and more of a veteran. She would describe herself as still in great shape but more of a “different engine” than in her younger days.
Just like at the 2007 Pan Am Games, Brazil stepped out at a packed Maracanã, this time in the semifinals up against Sundhage’s Sweden. The match ended in a 0-0 draw and went to penalties. Marta stepped up and scored, but the shootout ended with a Swedish victory. When Brazil midfielder Andressa Alves missed the decisive penalty, Marta stood for a second in shock and then slumped to the ground in tears.
16. Walking through the halls of the CBF in 2019, Sundhage (now Brazil women’s manager) grew more annoyed with every step. An on-site museum paid homage to the great men’s teams of its past; it displayed their five World Cup trophies and nine Copa America titles; there were pictures of their great players: Neymar, Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho and Sócrates. At one point, there is a statue of Pelé.
And yet, Sundhage observed, there was barely any mention of the Brazil women’s side. “It was a fight to take steps for the women’s game in Brazil, from my first day to my last day,” she tells ESPN.
Within three years, Sunhage helped create more representation at the museum, honouring players like Formiga, Cristiane, Sissi and Pretinha. For Marta, she lobbied the federation to build her a wax statue, which they did in 2022, and Sundhage was at the ceremony to mark its unveiling next to the one of Pelé.
“Marta was the best player in the world and today they treat her with respect and that is a unique situation,” she says.
17. Type in Marta’s name on Google and within a click or two you’ll find what is perhaps her most infamous moment on a football pitch. It didn’t come when the ball was in play, or even during the game itself. It came afterwards, as she stood on the sideline following a round-of-16 exit to France at the 2019 Women’s World Cup, giving a TV interview unlike any other.
You likely already know the speech. Marta had long ago graduated from shy teenager to one of football’s greatest ambassadors, and this was her crowning moment. She spoke of the need for the next generation of girls to play football.
“This is just an emotional moment,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “I would like to be here smiling but here I am crying with joy. That’s the most important thing: cry in the beginning so you can smile at the end.”
Later, she stared down the lens of the camera: “You won’t have Formiga forever, you won’t have Marta or Cristiane forever. Women’s football depends on you to survive, so think about that.” Marta never planned the speech, it was off the cuff, with her raw emotions coming out just as her Women’s World Cup campaign was over.
