Not only does her father own the team her husband, Aaran Lines, is the team's coach. Still, it might be more accurate to say that Marta plays on her team. Now 28, Alexandra is on the bench down below, playing on Marta's team. Sahlen got interested in soccer when his daughter Alexandra started playing as a child. They cheer as Marta jogs onto the field.Ĭlub owner Joe Sahlen sits up in the stands in an air-conditioned box with leather armchairs and a built-in kitchen. In the United States, soccer is their sport. Inside, the stadium looks like it is supposed to host a huge party for kids complete with disco music, soccer bingo and face painting. Today, the Western New York Flash is playing a club called magicJack from Boca Raton, Florida. For bathrooms, the players use portable toilets in the parking lot. There, the bus parks next to a prefab trailer on the edge of a shallow stadium. Each home game is more like an away game for the team since they don't have their own stadium in Buffalo, they have to play an in Rochester, an hour's drive away. The next afternoon, Marta and the others are back in front of the gym, waiting for the bus. Marta shares hers with Maurine, another Brazilian. When the man shuts off his camera, Marta picks up her backpack, heads out to her car and drives home to Orchard Park, another suburb of Buffalo, where the club keeps apartments for its players. He wants to talk about famous soccer players, about the men but Marta replies that, despite sharing an agent, she hardly knows him. The man asks how she gets along with Ronaldo. Marta shows the TV reporter around and tells him that her idols are star Brazilian players Rivaldo and Ronaldinho, and that her agent in Brazil also represents Ronaldo, the recently retired Brazilian soccer legend. The club's coach notes that the local media hardly paid any attention to it before Marta arrived. That's what she left Sweden for, though it wasn't an easy decision.Īs the women from the photographer's team break down their equipment, a cameraman from a Brazilian sports broadcaster is already waiting. At that point, a new, professional women's league was just starting up in the United States, and it needed players like her to make it big. This is Marta's third club since coming to the United States about two years ago. The club's owner, Joe Sahlen, also owns a meat-packing company in Buffalo. Niagara Falls isn't far away, and the countryside is flat and green. When she talks about Sweden, her countenance grows softer.īut now she's here, in the western part of New York State, where she's been playing for a club called Western New York Flash since the spring. She learned Swedish, made a lot of friends and had a good life. She stayed there for five years during that time, her club won the championship four times. That's where she learned to live on her own and to take better care of herself. She wondered if people really played soccer there. She'd never seen snow, but now it was everywhere. When she arrived, it was summer in Brazil and winter in Sweden. Two weeks before her 18th birthday, Marta moved to a Swedish city near the Arctic Circle, where she had landed a contract with a club called Umeå IK. She sounds almost annoyed again at having to explain her life any further. "I live where I can play, where I can improve," she says, adding that it's always been that way. When she was 14, Marta took a bus to Rio de Janeiro, tried out for a team and stayed. Though her mother worried, she still didn't forbid her daughter from playing. "With the boys, on the street, without shoes." The neighbors talked about her, and her brothers were annoyed. How did she start playing soccer? "I was seven," she answers. Then she suddenly asks: "Okay, the interview, can we do it right now?" She says she isn't interested in talking about herself anymore, that she's too exhausted. She has a slim, angular face and large eyes that change expressions as frequently as she changes moods. Her voice is deep and throaty, and she sounds much older than she is. Marta talks quickly, almost in a rush, and she prefers Portuguese to English. SPIEGEL Media Menü SPIEGEL Media aufklappen.Alle Magazine Menü Alle Magazine aufklappen.SPIEGEL-Heft Menü SPIEGEL-Heft aufklappen.Gutscheine Anzeige Menü Gutscheine aufklappen.Marktplatz Anzeige Menü Marktplatz aufklappen.Partner-Inhalte Anzeige Menü Partner-Inhalte aufklappen.Wissenschaft Menü Wissenschaft aufklappen.Formel 1 – Liveticker, Kalender, WM-Stand.
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