When she was nine years old Maribel Dominguez’s family moved from the pine-dotted picturesque volcanoes of Mexico City’s semi-rural southern fringe to the unremitting urban sprawl stretching east alongside an open sewage canal. But there were important compensations.
Dominguez’s new home was close to a patch of wasteland where boys her age played football whenever they could. With a natural flair for the game already showing, the short-haired and flat-chested new kid on the block was soon accepted into the heart of the group. They called her Mario.
”I tricked them for years,” Mexico’s best female footballer confesses. ”They only found out I wasn’t a boy when they saw my picture in the paper because I’d got into the sub-national women’s team. They went to my house and asked my mother if I was really a girl. They were pretty shocked.”
The 26-year-old striker who was this year ranked 17th-best female footballer in the world allows a hint of wistfulness as she remembers the innocence of those years. The days are gone, she has just discovered, when her cheek and talent could blur the gender division within the sport with such ease.
Last month Dominguez accepted a two-year contract from a second-division Mexican football club, Celaya, which was lacking a centre forward and, probably, looking for a bit of publicity. The national football association announced it had no problem with the idea in principle but would take the matter to Fifa in Zurich (football’s governing body) for a definitive decision.
The only precedent had been an attempt by Italian club Perugia to sign Germany’s Birgit Prinz, and Sweden’s Hannah Ljungberg. That project was aborted before Fifa ruled, and both players now play in European women’s leagues.
”The thing is, that in Mexico we don’t have even a decent amateur league for women, so you have to look for other options,” Dominguez explains. ”I knew that the decision could go either way, but we were expecting a yes.”
She was wrong. A terse statement from Fifa just before Christmas quashed Dominguez’s hopes and shut the door on mixed teams now or in the future.
”There must be a clear separation between men’s and women’s football,” the organisation stated. There could be ”no exceptions”.
The message was driven home by a further ban on Dominguez appearing in an exhibition game outside the league but still alongside men.
”I just wanted to be given the chance to try,” says Maribel — or Marigol as she is now known in the local press because of her record of 46 goals in her 49 matches for the national squad. ”If I failed I would have been the first to say I can’t do it, the first to admit it doesn’t work. But at least I would have tried.”
In a nation proud to call itself football mad, and rather less comfortable with its worldwide reputation for machismo, the idea of a woman playing in a men’s league was bound to catch people’s imagination and Dominguez has become a household name. Celaya’s presentation of their new striker in mid-December immediately sparked heated discussions around the country.
Still, the battle lines have largely fallen along gender lines, with even normally PC-perfect men revealing deep fears that allowing mixed teams, however talented the women, would alter the tone, rhythm and ritual of an essentially male game. The feminist lobby, meanwhile, has discovered a new icon in Dominguez.
The youngest of nine siblings, she began by emulating her three brothers. She found knocking a ball around with them more fun than dressing up dolls with her five sisters, although it carried risks of a beating from their alcoholic father who worked in a tequila warehouse.
Dominguez’s washerwoman mother was more understanding, but even she balked at the idea of her youngest daughter playing in a boys’ team and went through a phase of hiding her boots.
”It just made me more determined to play.”
As she got older Dominguez joined women’s teams in different parts of the capital, although none were very good. Then, at 20, she was called up to the national squad and the dream of making a living from football began.
The team qualified for the Women’s World Cup in the United States in 1999, and although they lost all their games they couldn’t fail but be caught up in the euphoria of the event that seemed to herald a new era for women’s soccer. The sport became particularly popular in the US and for a few years Dominguez went off to play in semi-professional US teams, and in 2003 joined the professional side Atlanta Beat which came second in the championship that year.
The American league fell apart thanks to a lack of sponsorship immediately after, but the Athens Olympics provided Dominguez with enough to think about for 2004.
She led the Mexican team into the quarterfinals, while the men’s squad failed to get beyond the first round.
”Maribel really is very, very good,” says Nora Herrera, one of a handful of women football journalists in Mexico. ”She has an incredible nose for a goal, she can smell it, and she’s fast and courageous, a good header and surprisingly strong too.”
Hardly surprising then that the Dominguez family now oozes pride for the rebellious tomboy who once worried them so much. Her five housewife sisters advise her to stay away from marriage as long as she can, while her brothers (two carpenters and a salesman) cannot match her income even if this lags pitifully behind that of male players. Dominguez receives about £600 a month in state scholarships, along with sponsorship deals that add a few thousand pounds more a year. Top male Mexican players can earn up to £60 000 a month, while second-division footballers can expect up to £6 000.
But while Fifa’s unequivocal ban has ruled out ever earning a man’s salary, Dominguez is not really back where she started either. Spurred on by the media frenzy, big business names in Mexico are beginning to talk about sponsoring a women’s league, perhaps as early as 2006. The Mexican striker is also attracting interest from teams in Europe, where women’s football is proving more resilient than in the US.
But whether she ends up training on her own or playing in Spain, Dominguez says her wider objective remains the same: to play in another World Cup and another Olympics before taking her savings and her reputation and putting them into a football school for girls.
”To play in one of those tournaments feels just incredible. To play all together, to all play at your very best, to score a goal when everybody, the whole world, is watching. There is nothing like it. It is beyond words. It is the best thing that can ever happen to a footballer. The very best.”
Those penetrating eyes dart around the room again as she stops her train of thought for a few seconds. ”Well, for a woman footballer it’s the best thing that can happen. For a man, maybe earning a million dollars a month is better. I wouldn’t know.” — Â