Goals for Girls

Villa 31 is a mish-mash of tin roofs, wooden walls and concrete blocks. Buenos Aires’ biggest villa, wedged in behind Retiro train and bus station, is a slum home to almost 23,000 people, including a handful of girls who hope to be the next big thing in football.

‘Goals for Girls’ is a girls football team, in the slums. Currently only 15 girls regularly turn up to practise and only occasionally play matches. But it has a lot of potential, and do you know what? They’re really very good.

The Beginning

The project began when master’s student Allison Lasser came to Buenos Aires from the US in 2005. Through a friend from Unicef, she was introduced to the villa, and having played football since she was five years old, and wanting to help, she offered to do some training.

“I went one day with [my friend] and started talking with parents and there was a huge interest! So, I started showing up two times a week and giving practice.”

“We were a safe place where the girls could always come, no matter what was going on. We strove to teach responsibility, and right and wrong, and protecting yourself from pregnancy and disease, and healthy living, and self-respect, a lot on gender and leadership,” she explains.

The team began to form slowly, and even played in some local tournaments, but lacked financial backing to continue after Allison returned home. She hunted around for funding and an organisation which was willing to continue the work she had started.

“I vowed that I wasn’t going to leave the girls abandoned. That was what I had always promised them. As a student of ‘development’, I’ve seen so many times how many people go and do supposedly ‘good’ things in all parts of the world and then leave. Without making the project sustainable, the do-gooder simply leaves the community with frustration after pulling the resources out.”

Allison and friends founded a non-profit organisation which they called ‘Soccer for Success’, based in San Francisco. They recruited the help of Santiago Mariani, founder of Democracia Representativa in Buenos Aires, to run things on the ground in their absence.

The addition of Mónica Santino, the coach, to the team was a vital step in the project’s development. She started a similar team just outside of Buenos Aires, and had a great deal of experience in women’s football and gender issues. She previously played as a midfielder for the rather ironically named Argentine Club ‘All Boys’. Now in her forties, she is a registered coach and manages the girls’ football team.

A Social Tool

There is now a small team working and training regularly: Mónica the trainer, Hugo the administrator, and 15 girls. They are hoping to add a social worker to this number, who will ensure the girls’ regular progress.

“It gives them an alternative to stay away from the problems affecting this area, such as teenage pregnancy, prostitution, drugs, violence, dropping out of school,” Mónica tells me.

The team environment, and sense of belonging are intended to provide some structure and security in the girls lives, and teach them aspects of life that they were otherwise missing out on.

So whilst the football is, of course, very important, it also makes them feel part of a group, away from men, their parents or the authorities, within which they can speak about their worries, fears and hopes. It is a novel way to get the girls interested in different things and addressing important subjects.

The project has of course had some difficulties. Recently a game had to be cancelled because the spot where they had chosen to host the game, the second in their history, had recently been the scene of a murder.

Tough Times

The major difficulty, however, is taking the girls away from the domestic, family duties that they are usually required to do. “Having them show up on time was a major problem,” Allison says. Swapping cleaning or working for a few hours in order to run about playing football is just not an option for many of the families in the villa.

The stigma and stereotypes surrounding womens’ football do not help either. Even if the parents are willing to allow their children the time, they may not agree with the projects’ principles. It is like ‘Billy Elliot’ in Buenos Aires; time and money constraints, and cloudy gender issues stopping children from doing the sports that they enjoy.

Getting the parents on board was therefore vital. Allison explains: “When one girl would skip class, the parents would take soccer away from her by not letting her come to train…the idea was we didn’t want the parents to see soccer as an add-on, but rather as a place of hope and refuge.”

Traditionally a male-only sport, Goals for Girls is very aware of the social norms that they are breaking in giving girls football training. Most of the time they try to avoid any possible confrontations; by training between 11am and 2pm, Wednesdays and Fridays, the girls do not have to put up with a judgemental audience, and they can avoid intimidation.

The Game

The efforts of everyone involved seem to have paid off. On the 24th May the girls played their third match, against Mónica’s other team from the Centro Municipal de la Mujer de Vicente López, a villa to the north of Buenos Aires. It was witnessed by a thin crowd that had collected around the pitch, including myself and a film crew, who were filming a documentary on football in Argentina; it seems the girls have been getting some publicity!

There were 11 girls on both sides, sporting their shiny blue and black kits. There was a football and two goals, a referee and some pre-match warm-ups. There were also however, two ragged dogs occasionally running on and off the pitch; no lines marking the pitch and no grass on it; and at one point an elderly man pushing a trolley marked ‘Panchos $2’ stumbling across the pitch. But other than these things, it had all the makings of a great match.

The quality of play startled me outright. I have never seen girls play so well. Obviously they had not been quite so excluded from the game as I had thought. One of the girls, Pamela, who was rumoured to have been scouted by San Lorenzo, lobbed the keeper from 20 yards.

After 45 minutes of play, the Villa 31 girls had put a whacking eight goals past the visitors who had scored zero. They seemed very happy with their performance, but perhaps happier with the choripans they all got afterwards.

Abygail, 14, told me in between mouthfulls that she loves playing football, shortly before 12-year-old Mirna butted in to inform me that Palacio, a Boca Juniors player, is ‘the love of her life’. They all ran off to collect permission slips from Mónica before I could ask more questions; she has a day trip
planned in the form of a football clinic with a trainer from the US.

The Future

So the project continues. Hugo, the project manager from Democracia Representativa, has high hopes for it. The main thing is to consolidate the current team and expand the squad.

He admits too that next years budget must be secured. The project is currently short of funding. With most of the funding being provided by Allison’s Soccer for Success, and some from Democracia Representativa itself, the budget is still short $3,000 for this year. Equipment, transport and food for the players are just a few of the costs that must be covered.

Whilst the buses and banks of the surrounding area continue on their merry way, the girls of Villa 31 are finding their own way to entertain themselves.

For more information on donating, visit http://laschicas-villa31.blogspot.com (Spanish) or email hugo.passarello@gmail.com