7 Facts about Marta (she has more awards than Messi and CR7)

That Alagoas Marta Vieira da Silva, better known as Marta, is a Brazilian soccer player who has more awards than Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, everyone already knows. However, the fantastic career of this athlete is full of overcoming and curiosities.

O awesome.club brings you some curious information, such as the fact that she is the only one to have her name on the Maracanã Walk of Fame among 103 professional players.

As a child, long before using her feet and conquering the world, Marta used her hands: she was a handball player. She still keeps the medal of a championship that she played in her school days.

Football in the life of the Brazilian player began early, in 1999, when she was only 13 years old and went to play for CSA, an amateur team from the city of Dois Riachos, in Alagoas, which has a famous namesake in Maceió. A year later she was already in Rio de Janeiro playing professionally for Vasco da Gama, where she stayed until 2002. From there she was loaned to a team from Minas Gerais, Santa Cruz Futebol Clube, where she stayed until 2004. the Umea IK, from Sweden.

At the age of 17, in 2003, Marta was already very successful due to her performance abroad. That same year, she scored her first goal for the Brazilian national team, during the World Cup in the United States. In all, Marta participated in four World Cups and scored goals in all of them. His good performance earned praise even from the organizer of the tournament, Fifa (International Football Federation). In these World Cups, Brazil’s best position was runner-up in China, in which Marta says she scored her best goal in a World Cup.

Edson Arantes do Nascimento, King Pelé, scored more than 1,200 goals in his career. However, only 95 of them were for the Brazilian team. In 2015, Marta surpassed that mark by reaching 98 goals during the Women’s Football World Cup. Another statistic in favor of Marta is that she scored 15 goals in World Cups, while Pelé, despite being three times world champion, scored 12.

Since 2015, the striker has been part of the permanent exhibition “Anjos Barrocos”, at the Museu do Futebol, located at the Pacaembu stadium, in São Paulo. In addition to her, only striker Formiga, who represented Brazil in six consecutive World Cups, represents women in the exhibition. Marta also left her feet engraved on the Maracanã Walk of Fame.

Marta now plays for Orlando Pride, in the United States. However, most of her international career was built in Sweden, with teams like FC Rosengård, the 2016 Swedish champions after 19 years in the queue. Last year she got Swedish nationality. Speaking to a local newspaper, Sydsvenskan, she said that the option for Swedish nationality was not about her history with football in the country, but about choosing the country in which she wants to live.

Did you know that women were banned by law from playing soccer in Brazil for almost 40 years? Those who were caught hitting a ball were taken to the police.

What is your opinion on the matter? Should a woman play football or not?

Which Brazilian sports star would you like to see portrayed by our team?