Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect Brazil making it to the World Cup final on Saturday, August 10, and Marta returning to the roster after serving her two-game suspension.
One week ago, Marta’s Olympics — her sixth, and final major tournament — looked to be over. She had come in with her boot high on a rash challenge in Brazil’s final group stage match against Spain. A deserved red card was thrust into the air, and Marta could not stop the tears that came, spilling them into the grass at Stade de Bordeaux.
Down to 10 players, Brazil gave up two goals in that final group stage match. They snuck through into the knockout rounds as a third-place team, thanks to the slimmest of margins: a -2 goal differential, compared to Australia’s -3.
For the next two matches, all she could do was wait and watch, helpless to put her mark on Brazil’s quarterfinal against France, and then their semifinal rematch against Spain. As she watched on from the stands feeling a rush of emotions and celebrating that moment of release with the full-time whistle that signaled Brazil’s return to the Olympic final, Marta was in so many intangible ways, a force.
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“Sabemos o quanto você queria estar presente e estava,” forward Kerolin wrote in a social media post after the quarterfinal — “We know how much you wanted to be there, and you were.”
On Tuesday, Kerolin provided the final dagger in Brazil’s win over the reigning World Cup champions Spain, straight through the legs of goalkeeper Cata Coll in the first minute of stoppage time. Pure ice in the heat of yet another night under the lights in Marseille, it guaranteed Brazil would be on a train to Paris the next day.
Marta, twenty years out from making her Olympic debut, has been gifted a new chance to write her own ending here in France. She’s never won gold before, nor been on the podium of any major tournament. Her two silver medals came in 2004 and 2008, both losses to the U.S. (and both secured in extra time).
Perfect endings are hard. They sometimes feel impossible in this sport. But Marta has been writing her own story, full of hunger, full of passion, and most of all, full of joy, for a while now. No matter what, she’s heading back to Orlando with a medal around her neck.
It all started well enough, with Marta even looking as if she had scored the Selecao’s opening goal before it was waved offside, but then provided the assist for the game-winning goal against Nigeria.
Then on Sunday, Marta thought she had helped create Brazil’s winning goal against Japan. She turned in the midfield to strike the ball cleanly through to a rushing Ludmila, who sent it to the feet of Jheniffer for the finish. On her 200th appearance for Brazil, it was a reminder of the creative magic she is capable of in the midfield.
Brazil controlled the match and looked on track for a second-place finish in their group and quarterfinal. Instead, Marta could only hold her head in her hands on the bench, unable to witness Momoko Tanikawa’s jubilant celebration following her stoppage time wonderstrike that gave Japan all three points.
Then, on Wednesday in Bordeaux, the unthinkable happened: Marta was ejected at the end of first-half stoppage time, after lunging mid-air to try and slow down Spain’s Olga Carmona. She began to cry almost immediately, knowing that this could be the curtain call on her final major international stage. For so long, she has entertained, she has danced, she has fought with every ounce of her being.
Marta was sent off against Spain for a dangerous kick (Juan Manuel Serrano Arce, Getty Images)
“What never changes is my passion for this game,” Marta told The Athletic before departing for the Olympics earlier this month. That’s why she says she still feels so special and happy when she puts on her Brazil or Orlando Pride kit. That’s why the 38-year-old still wakes up at 6 o’clock every morning to train, despite the Florida heat.
“This is my life. I’m still feeling so much passion to do that, and that’s why when I step on the field, I want to do my best,” Marta said. “I don’t want to lose games.”
There are plenty of enduring images of Marta on the pitch between the national team and a club career that spans Brazil, Sweden and the United States. In 2003, she weaved through Norwegian defenders. She broke USWNT defenders’ ankles at the 2007 World Cup semifinal. Closed in by two defenders, she cut the ball back with her left foot, then right foot, before roofing it with her left and tumbling into a celebration with both fists raised in defiance in perhaps her most iconic NWSL goal in 2017. She even had one final moment before she departed for the Olympics, with the undefeated Pride taking one last win on the road against Kansas City in front of a hostile crowd. At the final whistle, Marta leapt into the air before shushing the stands.
The moment that might have had the furthest reach, though, did not happen with her feet. After Brazil’s elimination in the 2019 World Cup at the hands of France, Marta — impassioned, tears welling in her eyes, pleading directly to the camera for the next generation of Brazilian talent to step up, to “cry at the beginning so you can smile at the end” — defined her legacy in one short speech.
“Cry in the beginning so you can smile in the end”
Marta’s message for Brazil’s next generation will give you CHILLS. 💛💚 pic.twitter.com/waDAFlgM4F
— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) June 23, 2019
Delivered five years ago, that plea felt like an ending. Last summer’s World Cup, filled with more tears at her final press conference, felt like another. Yet each time, Marta has remained: defiant, hungry, joyful.
The six-time FIFA World Player of the Year knew 2023 would be her last World Cup, and it was a tournament impacted by injury, having just made it back in time from an ACL tear to make the roster. She knew she would have to fight to play a full 90 minutes in their final group stage match, as Brazil tried to stave off elimination against Jamaica. It was not enough.
“(Marta) was my inspiration growing up and she still is,” Jamaica’s Bunny Shaw said after the game, and after she had shared a long embrace with her idol after the final whistle. “I think the way she carried herself, the way she played, the leader that she is — I just told her that she’s not just an inspiration for me, but for a lot of young girls in the Caribbean and around the world.”
Shaw credits Marta for all of the work she’s done for women in soccer (Alex Pantling, FIFA via Getty Images)
That’s her legacy, above all the individual accolades, even if she does finally get her major tournament victory on Saturday. She had no guarantees she could add to it at the Olympics, but now that it has arrived, one thing is certain: she’ll grab onto it with everything she has. And either way, the work still remains in Orlando. It doesn’t matter what color the medal is, she’s still driven to achieve. She still wants to entertain everyone watching.
“When I got back from the World Cup, I was thinking, ‘Well, is there only one way to get over this situation?’” Marta said. “It’s keeping on doing what I love to do, and then just doing your best.”
Marta announced that she would retire from international soccer earlier this year before she knew if she would make the Olympic roster or not. In the meantime, she’s been playing lights out soccer in Orlando, serving as the team’s captain — she’s contributed five goals in the team’s 11 wins and five draws from 16 games. And for everything she’s gone through in her time with Orlando in the NWSL, as special as this 2024 season has been, amplify that by about 100 for the Selecao.
Anticipating these final times of donning the canary yellow, Marta always goes back to the beginning — before all the awards, before her debut for Brazil, before she got on the bus that took her out of Dois Riachos.
“The first thing that comes to my head is the little girl, who had a dream to be in the national team, and how hard it was,” she said. There was no league then in Brazil, but that bus led her to a club, Vasco de Gama in Rio de Janeiro, in 2000 as a 14-year-old. Those are the days Marta promised to remember here in France.
“I work so hard to be here, so I need to enjoy it. I need to enjoy this moment because I’m going to leave this moment — I won’t have the same tomorrow. So I don’t think about other things. I just think: ‘Let’s have fun, but never forget what you went through to be in this moment.’”
But no one else will ever know the unique journey that Marta Vieira da Silva has been on since that bus ride 24 years ago, though they have watched her perform time and time again on the biggest stages.
For all of the talk about her skills, her GOAT status, her leadership for club and country, and her inspiration to multiple generations of players across the world, there is still one thing that is never talked about enough: her joy. That side of Marta was lost for the past week in many ways after that red card, even as with every goal Brazil scored without her, the first impulse was to try to get a glimpse of her in the stands.
And that joy was on full display after the win over France in the quarterfinal, one that felt maybe even more special as France has been the cause of so much pain for Marta at recent major tournaments like 2019. Seeing that pure relief breakthrough was a reminder of how long this journey has been. Perhaps that makes it even more important — to consider Marta as her full self, not just a single moment of lost control.
These are familiar images of Marta too: with a guitar or another instrument, leading her team through the tunnels of a stadium or wherever they might be.
Angel City FC and U.S. women’s national team forward Christen Press, who was teammates with Marta in the Damallsvenskan (Sweden’s top league) at Tyreso, remembers being on a public train with Marta in the middle of nowhere Sweden during that 2013-2014 season.
“You’ve got Marta, she’s got her tiny guitar, and she’s just playing music on the train and singing. That just encapsulates who she is,” Press said. “There’s so much humility. She’s already at this point got like five World Player of the Year awards, and she’s just sitting on this tiny little Swedish train, just playing her instruments and smiling and dancing and laughing.”
(And yes, Press was right: by that point, Marta had won five of her six FIFA Best/World Player of the Year honors — a five-year run from 2006 to 2010.)
Marta’s spirit – and talent – extends way beyond the field (Photo by Naomi Baker, FIFA via Getty Images)
Back home in Orlando, Marta has a room full of instruments. She loves to play music, though she always downplays her talent level when asked. It’s the simpler things about being home, coming back from training with her girlfriend Carrie Lawrence (a defender also on the Pride roster). “Seeing Zeca, my little dog,” Marta said, her tone immediately growing fonder. “He’s always happy, no matter what. He always welcomes us with so much happiness, and this makes me feel so good.”
Those are the things she’s missing now, while in France — but at the same time, she wanted to miss them for the full month, from the start of tournament preparations through to the gold medal match on the final day. She wanted everything.
That balance of hunger, passion and joy is what makes Marta, Marta. The GOAT, but also so much more.
“I experienced firsthand how special she is as a human being,” Press said. “She has so much joy and passion for what she does — it’s just infectious. I love how people’s personalities shine through with what they do in their sport, and there’s no better example. She’s so much fun on the field because she’s a joy to be around.”
Marta — and Brazil — survived the wait to see if the knockout rounds were in store. They were. Marta had that deep well of passion and joy, and instilled it in her teammates, to rely on through the quarterfinals and semifinals. They stepped up for her. On Saturday, she can repay them on one of the grandest of stages at Parc des Prince, where in the group stage they cheered at every touch she made.
Marta now gets her third chance to take on the United States in a gold medal match. It’s hard to think she’d have it any other way.
(Top photo: Alex Pantling/FIFA for Getty; Design: Dan Goldfarb)
