“We are the first, but we will not be the last.” The rallying cry came from Eliane Gonçalves, a 39-year-old midfielder of the Brazilian women’s blind football national team during one of their training camps. The team’s psychologist had suggested the team come up with something to shout before matches. Gonçalves offered that line – and it stuck.
The team had existed for less than a year when they landed in Kochi, India, in October 2025. In their opening game of the world championship, Brazil beat the host nation 1-0 – and Gonçalves scored the goal. She had started playing only two years earlier after gradually losing her sight to a hereditary condition called retinitis pigmentosa. Sport had pulled her through the hardest period. “When I started losing my vision, I was very lost. Everything was completely different,” she says. “Sport took me out of depression. It gave me a better perspective on life, new dreams.”
Gonçalves went into the tournament not expecting to start games and when her teammates broke the news that she was in the team at training she didn’t believe them. Brazil advanced unbeaten to the semi-finals where they faced Argentina, the reigning champions. They lost 1-0 and then came out second best in the third-place playoff against Japan, but finishing fourth at a first World Cup with a squad assembled by video – since there was no domestic league to scout from – is good going.
Lígia Nogueira, 27, the team’s goalkeeper and one of the few sighted players in the squad, had spent her life playing conventional football in Ceará when the national team coach, David Xavier, came to watch her play without introducing himself. He stood behind her goal for the entire match. The invitation that followed took her somewhere entirely new. In blind football the goalkeeper is the only voice allowed in the defensive third – guiding players who cannot see her. “I thought I knew how to be a goalkeeper,” she says. “But I had to learn from scratch. It’s so much more than not letting the ball in.” Nogueira jokes that she leaves matches more tired from talking than from saving shots.
None of them were paid. Nogueira was juggling two university football teams, a physiotherapy degree and the national squad. Gonçalves had left her job to focus on training, knowing her window was short. In India the food was so spicy the team’s nutritionist had to negotiate with hotel chefs; they survived largely on tuna. “We suffered,” Gonçalves says, “but it’s part of it.”
Wagner Xavier is an anthropologist at the University of Campinas who studies gender and sport and explains why Brazil took 47 years to form a women’s blind national team. While the men’s national championships started in 1978, the women’s national team was only officially established in 2025. He says the delay happened because for decades football was treated as an exclusively male space and women with disabilities faced a double barrier of gender and disability prejudice, resulting in a total lack of investment and organised competitions.
Football, he argues, was built as a male space from its foundations – structured that way since the 19th century, when Baron de Coubertin founded the Olympic Games. “Women were considered assistants – in the sense of giving support and watching from the sidelines,” he says. “They were the first fans, but they were there as supporting characters in the process.” The division of domestic labour by gender, he says, “goes into public life too, reaching the most diverse institutions” – including sport.
Blind football is no exception. Blind football has been practised in schools in Brazil for the visually impaired since the 1940s, often without proper equipment. “Around the 1990s the practice was happening, but many times without a specific ball. Stories from that period tell of balls wrapped in plastic bags to make the rattling sound,” Xavier says. The men’s game was formalised and Brazil went on to win five Paralympic gold medals. Brazil’s first women’s team emerged in 2009 but folded due to a lack of competitions. Another decade passed before the confederation organised a first women’s festival in May 2022, bringing together 26 athletes. Training camps followed in 2024. Then a World Cup.
“If women’s blind football had emerged in the late 1990s it would not have gone anywhere,” Xavier says. “But today with the visibility of women players, with Marta’s prizes and recognition, that passes through the minds of young women.” With the Copa América coming to São Paulo in September 2026, the timing matters. “Until this is truly consolidated we have to make the most of it.”
What is at stake goes beyond results. “There is someone representing me – so there is a point of access. I could be there too. I could compete for a medal.” The goal, he says, is for women with visual impairments to feel no shame in seeing themselves on that pitch. “I am here. I represent. I am visible. I am a respected athlete.”
Gonçalves wants to keep going for as long as she can and to leave the team more consolidated than she found it. Before the interview ends she has a message for anyone losing their sight and unsure of what comes next. “Sport is here to embrace us,” she says. “I hope it can do for someone else what it did for me.”
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