Ary Borges: meet the women’s national team player – 07/24/2023 – Sport

Ariadina Alves Borges, 23, left Maranhão at the age of 10, where she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Lindalva, to live with her parents in São Paulo, where they were looking for better living conditions.

“I remember that, on my first day of school, when I arrived here, in the fifth grade, I was bullied a lot because of my accent”, said Ary.

The scorer of three goals for Brazil over Panama in the team’s debut at the Women’s World Cup took her first steps behind the ball at the age of six, encouraged by her uncle, Gabriel, who took care of a field in São Luís.

Shortly after arriving in São Paulo, her father took her to one of the headquarters of the Meninos da Vila, the Santos school, in Vila Mariana. She was the only girl at that time, after he convinced the place to accept her.

Anxious, she had to hear all the boys’ names being called until only hers remained. “Here she comes”, resigned the captain who chose her.

“That day, I was very sad”. “My father was on the fence and told me: ‘they’re going to break your face when you play’. We women, when we start playing football, we see these things from a very young age”, Ary told Sheet, in an interview given in early 2020.

More than ten years later, the player has confirmed her father’s optimistic expectations. After training for a year with the Meninos da Vila team, she began her career in the youth teams at the Centro Olímpico in São Paulo, joining the under-15 team at just 11 years old.

Ary was one of the five selected in a sieve that had about 90 girls. At the time, her family had moved from Jaguaré, in the west zone, to Capão Redondo, in the south zone, which made her have to spend, on average, an hour and a half to reach the club’s headquarters, close to Ibirapuera Park.

“My mother didn’t want to, but my father was a little crazy and said: ‘I’ll teach you once, and the other times you go alone’. I was scared, but I went”, she recalls.

At the Olympic Center, she went through all categories until she turned professional, in 2015. In 2017, came the first big break of her career, when she was hired by Sport. She played for two years for the Recife team, where she was two-time champion of Pernambuco, until she aroused the interest of São Paulo.

With the tricolor shirt, at the age of 19, she assumed the captaincy belt and was among the highlights of the Brasileirão Série A2 title campaign, in 2019.

At the end of the year, the captain surprised the board by not renewing her contract with the club. The bond would expire at the end of December. In early 2020, she signed with Palmeiras, which caused irritation in the São Paulo top hats.

“It was the best decision I could have made for my career. Wherever you work, you are always looking for improvements, and Palmeiras offered me that”, he argues.

At the time, the midfielder compared the structure offered to the alviverde women’s team with the one she had in the tricolor. “Here we have a gym that is ours, we are free to use it. In the field, we train whenever we want. It was different there. We shared the field with the partners. We never had a nutritionist”, she criticizes. “These are factors that weighed.”

For alviverde, Ary was champion of the Copa Paulista and Brazilian runner-up in 2021. In 2022, he won the Campeonato Paulista and scored one of the goals of the Copa Libertadores title, in the 4-1 victory over Boca Juniors, from Argentina.

At the end of 2022, she was hired by Racing Louisville, an American team from Kentucky founded in 2019 and currently ranked seventh in the National Women’s Soccer League, the US women’s soccer league.

The midfielder was already present in the selection’s squad since the sub-20. In 2022, she won the Copa América under Pia Sundhage.