Soccer & Society

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsas20

Playing for change: (semi-)professionalization,

social policy, and power struggles in Argentine
women’s football

Gabriela Garton, Nemesia Hijós & Pablo Alabarces

To cite this article: Gabriela Garton, Nemesia Hijós & Pablo Alabarces (2021): Playing for change:
(semi-)professionalization, social policy, and power struggles in Argentine women’s football, Soccer
& Society, DOI: 10.1080/14660970.2021.1952692

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2021.1952692

Published online: 21 Jul 2021.

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SOCCER & SOCIETY
https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2021.1952692

Playing for change: (semi-)professionalization, social policy, and

power struggles in Argentine women’s football
Gabriela Garton, Nemesia Hijós and Pablo Alabarces
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)/Gino Germani Research Institute, University of
Buenos Aires (IIGG/UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina

ABSTRACT
The professionalization of the Argentine women’s first division in 2019
allows an in-depth analysis of an underdeveloped and historically margin­
alized women’s football in Latin America. Following Argentina’s participa­
tion in the 2018 Women’s Copa América in Chile and the 2019 FIFA
Women’s World Cup in France, the precarious conditions faced by the
female football players were exposed as never before, drawing attention
from major national and international news outlets. In those years, the
players organized the first strike in a national team history; their actions
were accompanied by the regional feminist movement, local organiza­
tions, increased media coverage, and new gender-equity policies imposed
by the sport’s international governing bodies. Then, the Argentine
Football Association’s (AFA) decided to professionalize women’s football
in the country. This article hopes to shed light on the struggles and
progress of female participants in atraditionally androcentric sport prac­
tice and analyse the response from the institutions.

Introduction
On 16 March 2019, almost a century after the professionalization of men’s football in Argentina, in
the press room of the Argentine Football Association (AFA), the association’s president, Claudio
‘Chiqui’ Tapia accompanied by Sergio Marchi, general secretary of the Argentine Players’ Union
(Futbolistas Argentinos Agremiados), announced another plan for professionalization, but this
time of the women’s game. Starting with the upcoming 2019/2020 season, the women’s first division
would be ‘professional’ – though critics prefer to use the category ‘semi-professional’ since not every
player has a contract. In light of the historically negligent attitude taken by AFA and its affiliated
clubs towards women’s football which has resulted in female players’ marginalization and even
systematic exclusion from this sport, professionalization has marked a key moment in women’s
football history.1 Not only did AFA launch the plan to professionalize the league but it would also
finance it. The first eight contracts, the minimum per team, are financed by the association while the
clubs wishing to offer more than eight contracts must cover the costs with their own funds.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that between the beginning of Tapia’s administration in 2017 and
the announcement of the professional league in 2019, women’s football went from near invisibility
in the nation to receiving unprecedented levels of coverage in the media. This shift was related to
a set of factors which included the achievements of the women’s national team along with the
emergence and strengthening of the feminist movement in Argentina as well as the rest of Latin
America. This new visibility arrives alongside the initiatives driven by the Fédération Internationale

CONTACT Pablo Alabarces palabarces@gmail.com National Scientific and Technical Research Council (Conicet)/gino
Germani Research Institute, University of Buenos Aires (IIGG/UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 G. GARTON ET AL.

de Football Association (FIFA) and the South American Football Confederation (Conmebol) for
the development of women’s football.
This article aims to analyse the professionalization of women’s football in Argentina as part of
a dialectic process between the players’ struggle for better conditions, recognition, and opportu­
nities and the governance of the sport by AFA. Before delving into the analysis, however, we first
review some key literature on women’s football around the world specifically related to issues of
institutionalization, the notion of player agency, and the context of sport in Latin America. Next, we
consider the theoretical framework for our analysis which is built upon the idea of professionaliza­
tion as a social policy established by AFA and Paulo Freire’s notion of ‘concientização’ (‘conscien­
tization’) to consider the players’ role in the development of their sport.2 In the section on
‘Women’s football in Argentina’, we provide a brief socio-historical synthesis to understand the
context of the sport and its professionalization. In ‘Professionals or beneficiaries’ we present the
data, a combination of AFA president Tapia’s discourse at the event announcing the professional
league and field observations of female footballers’ experiences and actions, and carry out
a discussion of the ongoing struggle between these two groups. Finally, we conclude the text with
some reflections on the implications of the new professional league for female players and their
potential to effect change in the future.

Literature review
For this article, we’ve organized the review of the literature on women’s football around two main
themes: institutionalization and player agency, but we also highlight the research on women’s
football in South America. First, we highlight the importance of the contributions related to the
institutionalization of women’s football and the social policies related to its development and
promotion. Through a historization of women’s football in Denmark into consecutive temporalities
and the ordering of its development into stages, Anne Brus and Else Trangbæk provide
a methodological tool to carry out an evaluation of a similar process in Argentina, which we intend
to do in this text, by considering AFA’s role in the institutionalization and eventual professionaliza­
tion of Argentine women’s football.3 Is institutional support essential to the success of the sport?
How does a federation’s support influence the sport’s growth? According to which parameters does
a sport become powerful?
Questions such as these are introduced and explored in research on the management of women’s
football by national federations carried out by Kari Fasting in Norway along with Jonny Hjelm and
Eva Olofsson in Sweden.4 These reflections are complemented by Barbara Bell’s work on the 2015
UEFA Women’s European Championships which encourages us to consider the real change that
a ‘breaking point’ can generate, as we will hope to highlight in the case of the Argentine Women’s
National Team’s performance in the 2018 Copa America and its qualification for the 2019 FIFA
Women’s World Cup.5 Daniel Svensson and Florence Oppenheim’s research elaborates on the
strategies of ‘sportification’ utilized by the players of pioneer club Oxab (1966–1999) from
a Swedish town with a population of 900 to convince the SvFF, media, and public that the
organization of the sport should be taken seriously and would be worthwhile.6 This process of
transformation, transition (from amateurism to professionalism), development, and expansion of
women’s football is examined more in depth in Jørgen Bagger Kjær and Sine Agergaard’s qualitative
analysis of licencing systems and the application of a ‘regulated and rational business structure’ in
the football associations of Sweden and Denmark.7 These authors expand upon Julia Evetts’s
theoretical category of ‘new professionalism’, which through a focus on new organizational values
and structures emerged in response to changes in professional work in the context of globalization.8
The notion of ‘new professionalism’ refers to a context where professionalism holds a normative
value as a desirable attribute and at the same time is used by managers to control and generate
change within organizations. Applied to the world of sport, this concept can be useful while
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 3

observing the role of clubs and federations in the development, or control, of women’s football, for
example.
Through a detailed match analysis (over 10 thousand actions) of Sweden’s players in the FIFA
2002 and 2006 Men’s and 2003 and 2007 Women’s World Cups, Jonny Hjelm breaks down the
classic and extensive argument that ‘women’s football is bad’ and the supposed difficulty to market
the sport – which also directly influences income for the clubs.9 In Hjelm’s analysis, the author did
not find significant differences to justify the categorical criticisms frequently aimed towards
women’s football. His work affirms that the criticisms directed at the sport are biased constructions
which (re)produce rhetoric deeply rooted in machismo and sexism which can impact, directly or
indirectly, the sport’s ability to become financially independent and sustainable. At the same time,
Kenneth Cortsen’s work on the commercialization of women’s football in Denmark is inspiring as it
explores how the interaction between a new sporting product – in this case a ball called ‘Sensational
1ʹ – and positive female participation rates can improve the value of the sport and exploit related
commercial opportunities.10
Second, we highlight some of the research focusing on the agency and power of female
footballers gained through the recognition of their role and the conscientization which pushes
them towards eventual collective organization. Considering that studies on intimacy and friendship
have tended to consider same-sex friendships in relation to emotional support and the traditional
spaces of the private and domestic realm have historically been associated with the formation and
negotiation of friendships identified as ‘feminine’, the work of Kate Themen and Jenny van Hoof
provides us with an alternative mode of thinking.11 Themen and van Hoof’s research allows us to
deepen our analysis of friendships and social networks in the context of women’s amateur football
to consider the complexity and diversity of the ties among women, which have many more levels
than those which are typically represented.
Based on field work with Israeli female footballers, Amir Ben Porat describes, evaluates, and
interprets how the women he studied enjoy a kind of ‘relative autonomy’ dictated by their
environment.12 In practice, the environment is dominated by men: the (domestic and international)
institutions and players are subject to the daily functioning of their relative autonomy and the
players interviewed are conscious of the critical impact of gender and the restrictions placed on
them because football is considered a sport for men. Even though they are partially satisfied, they do
not have much hope in regards to women’s football when they compare it to the men’s game: the
foreseeable future is similar to the present. Nevertheless, change can come from collective action. In
this sense, Jean Williams provides an optimistic outlook by considering how women’s struggles
along with emotional and political ties – like the #MeToo movement in the United States and what
the ‘Ni Una Menos’ (‘Not one woman less’) movement in Argentina and throughout Latin America
could mean – could represent a turning point of empathy and resilience.13 Today, the obstacles of
censorship, ridicule, prohibition, intimidation, abuse, and underestimation which have faced
women’s football in the past (and present) are being overcome through certain strategies which
help change the narratives around the sport and define it according to its own terms.
Finally, we turn our attention to a geographical category: the literature on women’s football in
South America. To this point, the work we have cited originates mainly from the regions where the
most research has been carried out on women’s football – Western Europe, Scandinavia, and North
America. However, in countries outside the Global North, where men’s football has traditionally
been the focus, both in society and in academia,14 women’s football has become a topic of interest
where, as Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning highlight for the sociological study of sport in general, we
can learn more not only about sport but also about human societies.15 Here, we highlight
contributions from Brazil and Argentina though there have been notable advances in other parts
of Latin America such as Mexico and Colombia.16 In South America, Brazil opened the field of
studies on women’s football. The seminal work of Carmen Rial narrates the disadvantages of
women football players in the country while emphasizing an important point: there are records
of women’s football teams playing in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro dating back to the first decades of
4 G. GARTON ET AL.

the 20th century, so she marks the importance of recovering history in order to rewrite it.17
Similarly, the works of Silvana Vilodre Goellner and Cláudia Samuel Kessler analyse the introduc­
tion of the sport in the country and the prohibition of the practice for more than 40 years, which
impacted the structuring and development of the discipline.18 In a co-authored work, they address
issues related to the low number of tournaments, the low level of media coverage, the lack of
women’s teams in the main clubs.19 On the other hand, Goellnerand Kessler as well as Leda Maria
da Costa analyse the media and marketing discourses that highlight players’ attractiveness and
reinforce the notion that femininity should be preserved while reproducing the links between
football and hegemonic masculinity.20
In Argentina, since the first sociological studies on sport, gender has been a theme throughout in
the work on masculinities and national identities.21 However, until recent years, women’s relation­
ship with sport has been largely neglected, and an extended common sense that some spaces – such
as football – are from and for men has been reproduced in academia. The first incursions into
women in this traditionally male field considered them in the role of spectators at football matches
or as the ‘women of football players’.22 It wasn’t until the work of Adolfina Janson and Juan Branz
that women were studied as athletes,23 which has led to more extensive research on women as
footballers, which problematizes key issues in the studies on gender and sexualities with a goal of
understanding the production and reproduction of women’s subordinate positions as footballers.24
Other social scientists have begun to analyse the hegemonic representations that circulate in the
mass media and/or the self-representations that Argentine sportsmen and women construct on
social media.25 This article hopes to address an area of vacancy in the literature as an ethnographic
study on elite women’s football which focuses on the players’ struggles for recognition, gender
equality, and labour equity as well as their relation to the sporting institutions that govern their
practice while also articulating these issues with the wider social context and the growing feminist
movements in Latin America.

Social policy and conscientization

According to De Sena as of the 1980s, there was a shift in the State’s strategy for social policies which
shifted their focus towards the ‘symptoms’ rather than the ‘causes’, focusing on ‘combatting’
necessities through social policies that combine the public with the private.26 This process is called
focalization, an approach also employed by the international credit organisms, by which social
policy attempts to focus the benefits offered on the most ‘needy’ segments of the population.27
However, this process also implies a series of issues related to the use of this kind of ‘deficit’
thinking. Concentrating on these ‘needy’ or ‘problem’ sectors can also contribute to establishing
social structure, producing and reproducing living conditions. In this way, the State becomes an
actor as well as a space for the production and reproduction of social problems, the construction of
limits for its responsibilities, and the definition of the subjects who are ‘worthy’ of its interventions
as well as what conditions constitute ‘worthiness’.28
Women in particular are frequently found in the populations constructed as problematic and
destined to the State’s intervention not only at the national level but also in the agendas and
development programmes of international organisms such as the United Nations (UN) and the
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).29 In Argentina, women occupy a central role in social
policy, but although this centrality is considered a way to mitigate situations of poverty, it can also
result in an overloading of responsibilities for the beneficiaries as well as a way of reaffirming and
reinforcing the sexual division of domestic work.30 Internationally, this tendency towards the
feminization of policies can also be observed in the development programmes of organisms with
the explicit goal of gender equality. Nevertheless, in these programmes there is a general lack of
transformative intentions which aim to tear down and reconstitute the structures sustaining
inequality, and instead there is narrative which prioritizes the empowerment of women – as
individuals in the neoliberal sense of the term.31
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 5

Among these kinds of programmes, there are increasingly more which aim to achieve social
development through sport (sport for development) along with programmes for the development of
sport in itself.32 In the case of football, women almost always appear among the groups identified by
FIFA as beneficiaries of its development programmes which include the promotion and advance­
ment of women’s football as a priority for the federation.33 On a national level, certain members of
congress have moved for legislation that promotes women’s sport. For example, initiatives led by
feminist legislators and politicians such as the creation of the recreational women’s football league
‘Nosotras Jugamos’, whose matches are held in the most vulnerable neighbourhoods of the city, and
the passing of legislation for the public broadcasting of the women’s national team’s matches during
the 2019 World Cup. Although in this article we focus on development policies on a national level,
understanding these in the global context allows us to analyse how the professionalization of
women’s football in Argentina aligns with a broader trend around the world.
While these concepts allow us to consider how change is made from the top down, our research
is interested in change as a dialectic process, an interaction between dominant and subordinate
groups. In order to analyse the flip side of this process, we will use Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s
notion of ‘concientização’ or the idea of ‘learning to perceive social, political, and economic
contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality’.34 In his work on
Brazilian women’s football Jorge Knijnik used Freire’s concept of ‘untested feasibility’ to analyse the
athletes’ struggle for autonomy and recognition in a country where, like Argentina, football has
been historically considered a ‘man’s sport’.35 Here, we can similarly apply this concept to the
Argentine national team which after decades of struggling against but also tolerating negligence
from the governing bodies of sport began a process of conscientization. As highlighted by Freire,
this process can occur when the oppressed recognize that they are not in a ‘closed world’ without an
exit, but rather exist in a limiting situation which can be transformed.36 Beginning to see past these
limiting situations, which in large part was related to the support and change generated by the
feminist movements in Latin America since 2015 with ‘Ni Una Menos’, has been key in the events
leading up to the professionalization of women’s football in Argentina.

Women’s football in Argentina

The core data analysed in this article is the speech given by AFA’s president, Tapia, during the event
announcing the creation of Argentina’s women’s professional league, which is published online and
available to the public on AFA’s official website and YouTube channel. We will consider the project
of professionalization as if it were a social policy – an analytical decision which we will justify
throughout the text. However, we are not going to analyse the policy in itself, that is, the details,
value, and implementation of the contracts, but rather we are going to conduct our study using
Nancy Fraser’s notion of the ‘discourses about needs’.37 According to Fraser, through discourse we
can observe the authorities’ interpretations of needs, ranging from what can be defined as
a legitimate need to who can be defined as legitimately needy. In this way,

Dominant groups articulate need interpretations intended to exclude, defuse, and/or co-opt counter inter­
pretations. Subordinate or oppositional groups, on the other hand, articulate need interpretations intended to
challenge, displace, and/or modify dominant ones. In neither case are the interpretations simply
‘representations’.38

Reflecting on the (auto)ethnographic field work made for one of us with women’s football players
provides us with a context to analyse the discourses and actions of both groups presented by Fraser,
both the dominant – in this case AFA and the football clubs – and the subordinate – the players. In
other words, we propose to analyse a power dispute by considering the interplay between the official
discourse around professionalization, how the president of AFA presents himself and his relation­
ship with women’s football, and the experiences and actions of the players.
6 G. GARTON ET AL.

As highlighted above, the announcement of the new professional league took place in a context
of unprecedented media attention and coverage of women’s football and represented the first time
female players would be recognized as workers for their practice in Argentina (only the second
country in South America to take this step; Colombia was the first). Nevertheless, only two years
ago, the women’s national team had gone almost two years without a coach, without call-ups,
without matches, and without a world ranking because of the lack of competition – the team’s last
match had been during the group stage of the Toronto Pan-American Games in 2015. On the
domestic level, until 2016 AFA’s women’s league had stagnated with poor organization, multiple
failed attempts to broadcast the matches, and clubs which would join and drop out of the
tournament mid-season.39 Keeping this in mind, what generated this shift in AFA’s outlook
towards the women’s game?
Historically, football in Argentina has been played, narrated, and controlled by men, and
although its practice has never been prohibited by law – as was the case in other countries like
Brazil and England–, there are various mechanisms which have obstructed women’s entry and
participation in the sport.40 First, though not necessarily in order of importance, the media, sport
media in particular, has played a fundamental role in the construction of a national (masculine)
footballing tradition which simultaneously excluded women, as players, fans, and at all levels of the
game from the sport’s narrative.41 At the same time, the hygienic philosophies of that period heavily
influenced the development of school physical education programmes which were concerned with
maintaining girls’ femininity and preparing the female body for maternity.42 Football, already
considered a sport for men, rough, tough, violent, and physical, was determined not to be appro­
priate for forming young ladies as were such sporting practices as dance and gymnastics where they
could embody the traits of hegemonic femininity such as beauty and grace without the risk of
becoming ‘manly’.43 Similarly, sporting institutions – clubs as well as AFA – have been largely
responsible for the exclusion of women because of the lack of opportunities for them to participate
in organized competitions and leagues, an absolute dearth of youth divisions for girls, and, even in
the rare case of a club which did have a women’s team, little to no structural support in terms of
even the most basic conditions of their practice like having a pitch on which to practice and play let
alone having access to medical staff or adequate clothing or gear.44
After almost half a century of an ‘unofficial’ practice, of a football played in streets, neighbour­
hoods, and ‘potreros’, AFA organized the first official women’s league in 1991, although players of
that period have asserted that the league was more of an appropriation of an existing league which
was not recognized by the association. Eight teams participated in the inaugural season, but as we
already mentioned, the number of teams which formed the league was not stable. It was common
for teams to drop out in the middle of the competition for financial reasons or inadequate
infrastructure. However, in 2015 and 2016, some significant changes were made in the organization
of the league, starting with the creation of the second division and the development of a season
where clubs would play each team home and away. Some games were also broadcast online via TyC
Sports’ YouTube channel and eventually televised on Crónica TV (2017–2019) through
a collaboration with El Femenino – an Argentine media outlet exclusively dedicated to covering
women’s football.
Despite these small advances, professionalism remained seemingly far away, especially consider­
ing that amongst the teams of the league, players experienced (and continue to experience) unequal
realities.While in clubs such as UAI Urquiza, Boca Juniors, San Lorenzo, and River Plate a situation
could be observed which was more similar to the illegal professionalism or ‘marronismo’ of the pre-
professional days of men’s football prior to 1931,45 many other clubs did not offer (and still do not
offer) the basic conditions needed by players to compete at an elite level, such as a training pitch and
adequate clothing. Throughout Garton´s field work with UAI Urquiza between 2015 and 2017, she
observed a ‘modern and female’ version of ‘marronismo’, or illegal professionalism. Many players
were able to study thanks to scholarships offered by the club; many worked, the majority within the
institution; many lived in housing provided by UAI Urquiza; and the majority received some form
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 7

of monthly stipend to cover costs of travel or other expenses. Some were paid around 400 pesos per
month which in 2016 was the equivalent of approximately 25 US dollars. Nevertheless, this amount
would also decrease in value in proportion with inflation and the rise in the price of the dollar in
those years. By the end of 2017, 400 pesos were worth approximately 21 USD. Their lives were
organized by and revolved around football. In order to continue playing and sustain themselves
financially, most players in the women’s league had to find a part-time job with a schedule which
did not conflict with training and matches, which was a challenge for players at other clubs that did
not or could not offer employment within the institution.
These conditions generated a state of ambiguity in the relationship between clubs and players.
The lack of contracts and a clear agreement left the responsibilities of each part blurred and obscure.
As a result, players would find themselves in a state of precarity in which they could be dropped by
the club at any time when the team no longer required their services. For many, especially the
players from other provinces, this could represent the loss of not only their position on the team,
but also their home in Buenos Aires and an entire network of relationships they had built in their
new environment.
So, coming back to 2019, 28 years after AFA’s women’s league was founded, the first ‘profes­
sional’ women’s football league is born, but under very different circumstances from the professio­
nalization of men’s football in 1931. While in 1930, the main proponents of a professional league
were the clubs themselves which considered it to be a ‘natural’ progression in the context of the
sport’s popularization and the association fought to sustain amateurism, currently the process is
reversed for women’s football. AFA along with the players’ union is driving – or even imposing –
and financing the implementation of the first professional contracts for female players. Nonetheless,
we aim to analyse AFA’s recent interest in women’s football given its historic negligence of female
players’ needs and struggles.
On March 29th, 2017, AFA’s General Assembly elected the association’s current president
Claudio ‘Chiqui’ Tapia, who until that moment had been president of Club Barracas Central of
the city of Buenos Aires. Tapia already had significant experience in AFA with close relationships
with influential leaders within the organization. Along with this change in leadership came
a restructuring of the association and the birth of the ‘Superliga’ modelled after the English
Premier League and Spanish La Liga which manage the first division clubs separately from the
rest which remained under the power of AFA as did the national teams. This separation generated
autonomy for the league to negotiate its own commercial contracts and broadcast agreements for
the clubs from the highest division. The election of Tapia also brought with it a shifting of the
authorities and leaders of AFA’s various committees and commissions.
Women’s football was not immune to this restructuring. After 21 years under the command of
the same president of the Commission of Women’s Football, new leaders were elected with Ricardo
Pinela at the head until early 2019. Shortly after Tapia entered his new role as president, in August
of 2017 AFA organized the launch of the Women’s League of that year where Tapia would declare
openly his desire to be the ‘president of gender equality for Argentine football’. Tapia’s statement in
2017 hearkens back to former FIFA General Secretary (1998–2015) Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter’s declara­
tion in 1995 that the ‘Future is Feminine’.46 His affirmation was published in FIFA News, and as
noted by Jean Williams, served a dual purpose: revealing the potential for growth of the sport while
carefully establishing female players’ (subordinate) position in the football ‘family’.47 The new
leadership of the women’s football commission also named a new coaching staff for the women’s
national teams – initially the same coaches would be in charge of all of the categories: full, U-20, and
U-17. This was the first time the full national team had a coaching staff after almost two years of
inactivity following its elimination from the Pan-American Games in Toronto 2015. Finally, in
September 2017, in preparation for the Copa América scheduled for April 2018, the coaching staff
began to call players in for training. However, upon returning to training, the players were not at all
satisfied with the conditions offered to them at AFA’s complex outside the city of Buenos Aires.
Soon after recommencing practices, the players entered into discussions with Pinela and other
8 G. GARTON ET AL.

leaders within AFA which did not have a satisfactory solution, leading the team to organize its first
ever strike in the history of Argentine women’s national team (and, also, men’s national teams). In
an open letter to Pinela, the players spelled out a series of demands to AFA: the payment of their
daily stipend to cover expenses, a better organization of travel and accommodation for future
matches, changing rooms with adequate space for the number of players in the squad, and the
opportunity to train on the complex’s natural grass pitches rather than the synthetic turf pitch.
Between the strike in 2017 and the announcement of the professional league in 2019, there were
three key events which cannot be ignored when considering Tapia and the executive committee’s
decision in regards to the women’s league, as will be explained: the national team’s ‘Topo Gigio’ pre-
match photograph in the Copa América, the team’s World Cup qualifying playoff match in Buenos
Aires, and Macarena ‘Maca’ Sánchez Jeanney’s legal action against her former club UAI Urquiza,
which also implicated AFA. During the announcement of the professional league, while responding
to various questions from the press, Tapia referred to all three of these moments but utilized three
different strategies with one objective in common: highlight his administration’s virtues while
minimizing the players’ struggle.

Professionals or beneficiaries
AFA’s plan for professionalizing women’s football appears as a kind of intervention to ‘level the
playing field’ of football which has historically left women to the margins with respect to men in
everything from opportunities for participation to visibility, media coverage, and financial
resources, for example. At the same time, this move towards equality also serves another purpose:
maintaining the paradigm of power in the relationship between female players and the institutions.
During the announcement of the professionalization of the league in 2019, on various occasions
Tapia referred both directly and indirectly to women’s football as underdeveloped or needy. For
example, at the start of his speech, Tapia declared:

At the beginning of this administration we said we were going to be the administration of inclusive football, of
gender equality, and we have been demonstrating that. This association has only one obligation: make football
better. AFA is going to support each one of the institutions [of the first division] with 120 thousand pesos,
which is the equivalent of eight minimum contracts over the course of a year. Without a doubt, we will
continue working to continue supporting it [women’s football] to be able to develop it in all of the provinces.

Throughout Tapia’s speech, the term ‘development’ appears repeatedly along with the idea of
gender equality and inclusion in reference to his administration’s policies and ideology in order
to distance himself from what he refers to as the ‘old AFA’. David Fairchild in an analysis of gender
in sport utilizes Peggy McIntosh’s interactive phases to present different stages in the transition
towards greater inclusion in sport.48 In the third phase, women are seen as a problem, an anomaly,
or are noted for their absence, and some change begins to take place. Women’s football in Argentina
appears to find itself in this phase during which the dominant forces are beginning to be questioned
and more opportunities are being generated for women in sport, but at the same time women
continue to be treated as victims or ‘deficient’ versions of their male counterparts, especially
through comparisons of their abilities and sporting achievements.49 In the same way, in Tapia’s
administration, issues of gender in reality are ‘women’s issues’ and equality is seen as a way to help
female players move from their underdeveloped, or deficient, position towards the male player’s
level. AFA’s programme situates female players in a relation of dependence on the institution while
Tapia positions himself in a role resembling that of a kind of ‘godfather’ of the sport and its
participants.
Following Tapia’s initial speech, the event continued with a time for questions from the
audience, which was composed of affiliates and employees of AFA, journalists, and the captains
from each of the first division women’s teams. A journalist from Telemundo Deportes, one of the
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 9

largest media outlets in the Americas, inquired about the source of the funds which would finance
the professional league. The president responded assertively that it would be AFA:
FIFA does not give any federation money to professionalize football, yes to have professional conditions, but
not to pay salaries nor subsidize institutions. Without a doubt, AFA has its own resources. Thank God, we’re
not going through the same thing today as before and can keep our commitments to all the clubs [. . .] These
are difficult decisions, and if you don’t have money, even more so.

By establishing AFA as the only source of funding for the contract and denying FIFA’s involvement,
Tapia once again attempts to distance himself from the ‘old AFA’, or the AFA prior to his
administration. He reinforces an agenda of inclusion and highlights the association’s autonomy –
though in other parts of his speech he acknowledges the partnership between AFA and the players’
union in the development of the league – not only in this decision but also in terms of the
association’s ability to govern Argentine football in general. In the two previous quotes, we can
begin to observe the dual function of professionalization: in the first, Tapia identifies the problem,
the underdevelopment and inequality in women’s football, while in the second, he establishes that
he has the political legitimacy and power, economic above all, to address what the market could not.
In response to a question on the sustainability of the league from a journalist from the quoted El
Femenino, Tapia seemed almost offended by the journalist’s query because of her apparent
closeness to the association:
Responding like this might come off badly, but you were part of this institution and you know our
commitments and you know how we’ve been working on media diffusion with the television broadcasts
because you were part of this project until not long ago. [. . .] So, without a doubt these are measures which will
be organized hierarchically, which will help us get sponsors, you know there are not many who want to offer
resources to women’s football [. . .], but we’ve made a commitment and we’re going to keep it.

With this last phrase, Tapia refers to women’s football as ‘needy’ while at the same time emphasiz­
ing AFA’s central role in the sport’s commercialization, in making it more attractive to potential
sponsors and investors. In other words, applying Tapia’s logic, without AFA’s involvement and
support, these companies would not be interested in investing in women’s football. However, in the
first part of his response, Tapia utilizes a different kind of strategy which also appears in other parts
of his presentation. He uses his administration’s actions and support of women’s football as a kind
of shield against any kind of criticism or doubt. According to this line of thinking, since AFA has
implemented some policies and undertaken projects such as the construction of a women’s locker
room at the national training complex and the launch of the professional tournament, his self-
proclaimed ‘commitment’ to be the administration of gender equality cannot be questioned.
There is a third, less obvious, function of this project of professionalization which is not openly
recognized by AFA nor by the players’ union: maintaining the social order.50 However, while
responding to a question from a journalist from TyC Sports regarding the motives behind the
announcement of the professionalization of women’s football, Tapia provides a glimpse of this
function:
Look, I have not had any complaints during my administration [. . .] When we took office, the national team
had not had a coaching staff for two years, we had no representation nor did we play anywhere because they
didn’t leave here [Argentina]. We were able to give our players the chance to return to competition in South
America, on a global level.

According to Vicente de Paula Faleiros, under the model of the liberal-paternalistic State, the social
policy institutions respond to pressures from popular demands which can affect or structure certain
forms of social policy in which the promotion of the market through liberal mechanisms combines
with the distribution of certain benefits by a public paternalistic power.51 At the same time, there is
an attempt to control and institutionalize these conflicts by eliminating, demobilizing, and depo­
liticizing the dominated forces in order to maintain the social order.52 In this part of Tapia’s
discourse, he denies any kind of movement against him, coopts the achievements of the women’s
10 G. GARTON ET AL.

national team, and positions himself as an ally and defender of women’s football. He does not
acknowledge the national team’s 2017 strike, the players’ lack of preparation for the 2018 Copa
América, nor Macarena Sánchez’s lawsuit.
Contrary to Tapia’s discourse of equality, since rising to power in 2017, there have been various
moments of discord and resistance from female footballers. Following the strike in late 2017, during
the final stage of the 2018 Copa America in Chile, the players of the national team posed for the
official pre-match photograph all together with one hand behind their ear. This pose was in
reference to the iconic ‘Topo Gigio’ goal celebration by the Argentine player Juan Román
Riquelme aimed towards the leadership of his club Boca Juniors as a manifestation of his dis­
satisfaction with his contract negotiations. After the match – which Argentina won 3–1 against
Colombia – every Argentine player posted the photograph on their social media with the caption
‘We want to be heard’. Even though the gesture was not directly only towards AFA, as it also
implicated the media and Argentine society in general, the decision behind the pose came about
mainly from frustrations in the team’s negotiations and discussions with the association’s leader­
ship regarding issues with stipends, prize money, and adequate clothing. The image was picked up
by both Argentine and international media, and resulted in the broadcasting of Argentina’s last two
matches of the competition on TNT Sports while the previous matches were only available via
internet streaming.
Following the ‘Topo Gigio’ photograph, achieving a third-place finish in the Copa opened up the
possibility to qualify for the World Cup for the first time in 12 years in a home and away playoff
with a team from the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football
(Concacaf). Argentina would play two matches against Panama, and the first would be as home
team in the packed stadium of Arsenal de Sarandí in the southern part of Greater Buenos Aires in
front of more than 10 thousand people. On October 31, the date, time, and exact location of the
match was announced on AFA’s official website and social media along with the information to
reserve a ticket – not to purchase because tickets were free. Within 12 hours of the posting, there
were no more tickets available. In his speech, Tapia coopts the home match of the playoff, using first
person plural when referring to the game: ‘when we played and we won at Arsenal’s stadium’
(emphasis our own). However, for the players – of the national team and the rest of the players in
the domestic league–, that triumph and qualifying for the World Cup represented the culmination
of their struggle for better conditions and more rights. Moreover, the fact that the match was played
before a full stadium was not only a first for women’s football in Argentina but also began to raise
doubts about the suppositions about the lack of profitability or commercial potential of the sport.
It could be said that the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’, or the catalyst, was Macarena
Sánchez’s lawsuit initiated in January 2019 against her ex-club UAI Urquiza and also implicated
AFA for the association’s inaction in the matter. The lawsuit demanded the legal recognition of her
relationship with the institution as a work relationship as a professional player and emerged
following Sánchez’s sudden dismissal from the club. Since her dismissal occurred in the middle
of the 2018/2019 season, according to the league regulations for signing and releasing players, she
was unable to play until after the end of the season six months later when the transfer window
would reopen. Her legal team composed a press release which stated that female players in
Argentina were ‘systematically vulnerable in their rights as workers for the simple reason that
they are women’ and made a comparison between the practices of illegal professionalism, ‘fraudu­
lent mechanisms’, in women’s football and the male players’ situation prior to professionalization in
1931.53 Sánchez’s press release and lawsuit received significant media coverage both in Argentina
and around the world, receiving robust support from feminist groups which condemned AFA for
its institutional machismo and patriarchal power model. Less than two months later, Tapia and
Marchi announced the prompt professionalization of the women’s first division.
Keeping these situations in mind, it is difficult not to subject AFA’s president’s discourse to
further analysis. Although Tapia asserts autonomy in the process of making decisions in favour of
‘gender equality’, particularly in the decision to professionalize women’s football, the events
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 11

described above allow us to relativize his affirmations of support of female players and their
practice. During Tapia and Marchi’s speeches, both made mention of plans of professionalization
which predated Sánchez’s lawsuit, but the opportune timing of the announcement leads to doubts
regarding the extent of the lawsuit’s influence, as well as the media attention it generated, on the
decision to launch the professional league. If we reconsider Tapia’s claim that he had not faced any
complaints during his administration but now with a comprehension of the context leading up to
the professional league launch, we can better critique the functions of the project for AFA. The
professionalization of women’s football was a kind of social policy which serves multiple functions:
addressing an area where the market fell short, supporting a ‘needy’ population – female players–,
offering labour rights – with AFA’s financial support – to previously informal labourers, and,
perhaps above all, attempting to maintain the social order.54 The launch functions as a ‘timely’
response, a hurried solution to the threats towards the current administration’s power in the form
of the destabilizing complaints of the players’ movement as well as the wider women’s movement in
Argentina.

Final reflections
According to AFA, the professionalization of women’s football is a major advancement for the
discipline, concrete evidence of the association’s president’s commitment to Argentina’s elite
female players. It must be acknowledged that the implementation of the first professional
contracts is an important step forward by which players now have rights as workers who can
make a living, or at least survive, on their sporting practice. Nevertheless, there are many issues
which raise doubts regarding this affirmation beyond the limits of an incomplete professionaliza­
tion which does not include all of AFA’s female players – only a minimum of eight per team and
only for first division clubs while the second and third divisions retain amateur status.
Furthermore, the majority of the clubs competing in AFA’s women’s league do not offer even
the basic conditions – space to train, adequate equipment, access to medical attention, a complete
and capable coaching staff – to sustain a professional squad, let alone incorporate youth divisions
and competitions in order to develop the level of play for the long-term. The context of the
decision to professionalize women’s football leads to questions of the motives behind the
association’s decisions regarding the discipline.
Despite Tapia’s reiterated public affirmations regarding his desire to be the ‘president of gender
equality’, we cannot stop but wonder why. In the context of a country where women are struggling
as a collective to earn more rights and occupy positions of power, it is clear that professionalization
constitutes part of a wider conflict between players and institutions to maintain the power and order
in Argentine football. By not acknowledging the role of the complaints and actions of Macarena
Sánchez and the national team, Tapia and the association effectively execute a manoeuvre which
simultaneously denies the participation of women in this process of the sport’s development and
replaces them with male leaders who less than two years earlier were almost completely oblivious to
the existence of women’s football. Tapia’s administration’s policies of ‘inclusion’ and ‘gender
equality’, manifested here in the form of professionalization, seem to support women’s football
development but at the same time positions women once again at the margins of the football world.
Freire affirms that an oppressor who discovers himself as such will not necessarily lead to solidarity,
but rather can lead to the rationalization ‘of his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the
oppressed, all the while holding them fast in position of dependence’.55 In AFA’s announcement
of the professionalization of women’s football, not only are female players denied centrality in the
journey towards a transcendental moment in the sport’s history but also they are required to
acknowledge the kindness of male administrators, unable to critique or question them, thus
maintaining masculine hegemony in a space which remains one of the last strongholds of machismo
in Argentina. For radical change to be possible, or to continue with Freire’s terms, for liberation to
12 G. GARTON ET AL.

occur, players’ actions and struggle to generate change must be recognized and supported by the
sporting institutions which have restricted women’s full participation in football for over a century.

Notes
1. Elsey and Nadel, Futbolera; and Garton, Guerreras.
2. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
3. Brus and Trangbæk, ‘Asserting the Right to Play’.
4. Fasting, ‘Small Country’; and Hjelm and Olofsson, ‘A breakthrough’.
5. Bell, ‘Women’s Euro 2005ʹ.
6. Svensson and Oppenheim, ‘Equalize it!’
7. Kjær and Agergaard, ‘Understanding Women’s Professional Soccer’.
8. Evetts, ‘New Professionalism and New Public Management’; Evetts, ‘A New Professionalism?’; and Evetts,
‘Sociological Analysis of Professionalism’, cited in Kjær and Agergaard, ‘Understanding Women’s
Professional Soccer’.
9. Hjelm, ‘The Bad Female Football Player’.
10. Cortsen, ‘“Re-branding” Women’s Football’.
11. Themen and van Hoof, ‘Kicking against Women’s Football’.
12. Ben-Porat, ‘Cosi (non) Fan Tutte’.
13. Williams, ‘Upfront and Onside’.
14. See Alabarces, Fútbol y patria and Héroes, machos y patriotas.
15. Elias and Dunning, Quest for excitement.
16. On Mexico, see Santillán Esqueda and Gantús, ‘Transgresiones femeninas’; Añorve Añorve, ‘El Desarrollo del
fútbol femenil’. On Colombia, see Ruiz Patiño, ‘Fútbol femenino’; Martínez Minaet al., ‘Fútbol y mujeres’; and
Biram and Martínez Mina, ‘Football in the Time of COVID-19ʹ.
17. Rial, ‘El invisible (y victorioso) fútbol’.
18. Goellner, ‘Mulheres e futebol’; and Goellner and Kessler, ‘A sub-representação do futebol’.
19. Goellner and Kessler, ‘A sub-representação do futebol’.
20. da Costa, ‘Beauty, Effort and Talent’.
21. See Alabarces, Fútbol y patria and Héroes, machos y patriotas; Archetti, ‘Masculinity and Football’; Archetti,
‘Estilo y virtudes’; and Archetti, Masculinities.
22. Binello and Domino, ‘Mujeres en el área chico’; and Binello, ‘Mujeres y fútbol’.
23. Janson, Se acabó este juego; and Branz, ‘Fútbol, mujeres y espacio público’.
24. Ibarra, ‘Disputas por el sentido’; Álvarez Litke, ‘Marcando la cancha’; and Garton, Guerreras.
25. Aráoz Ortiz and Moreira, ‘Prensa deportiva en Argentina’; Garton and Hijós, ‘La mujer deportista; and Garton
and Hijós, ‘“La deportista moderna”’.
26. De Sena, ‘Promoción de microemprendimientos’.
27. De Sena and Cena, ‘¿Qué son las políticas sociales?’.
28. De Sena and Mona, ‘A modo de introducción’.
29. Del Río Fortuna et al., ‘Políticas y género’.
30. De Sena, ‘Las mujeres’.
31. Kabeer, ‘Gender Equality’; Chant and Sweetman, ‘Fixing women’; Cornwall, ‘Taking off International
Development’s Straightjacket of Gender’; Cornwall and Rivas, ‘From “Gender Equality”’; and Oxford and
Spaaij, ‘Gender Relations’.
32. Coalter, ‘Sport Clubs’; Coalter, ‘The Politics of Sport-for-Development’; and Giulianotti et al., ‘Sport for
Development’.
33. FIFA, ‘FIFA Women’s Football Strategy’.
34. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and Hjelm, ‘The Bad Female Football Player’.
35. Knijnik, ‘Visions of Gender Justice’.
36. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
37. Fraser, Unruly Practices.
38. Ibid., 166.
39. Garton, Guerreras.
40. Elsey and Nadel, ‘Futbolera’.
41. Alabarces, Fútbol y patria and Héroes, machos y patriotas; Archetti, ‘Masculinity and Football’; Archetti, ‘Estilo
y virtudes’; and Archetti, Masculinities.
42. Scharagrodsky, ‘La educación del cuerpo’.
43. Hargreaves, Sporting Females.
44. Garton, Guerreras.
45. Frydenberg, Historia Social.
 SOCCER & SOCIETY 13

46. Cited in Williams, ‘The Fastest Growing Sport?’

47. Ibid.
48. Fairchild, ‘From the Mountains to the Valleys’.
49. Ibid.
50. Faleiros, ‘Las funciones de la política social’.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Frydenberg, Historia Social.
54. Faleiros, ‘Las funciones de la política social’.
55. Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Janson, Se acabó este juego; and Branz, ‘Fútbol, mujeres y espacio público’.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by the National Scientific and Technical Research Council, University of Buenos Aires
(IIGG/UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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