By Marta Elena Casanova
Follow us on social networks to stay updated on the latest transfer market news: Instagram, Facebook e X.
Index
If today women’s football in Italy is a consolidated reality—with professional teams, media coverage, and increasingly competitive championships—it is also thanks to those who dared long before it was considered legitimate. To those who wore cleats in the mud when football for women was still taboo. One such figure is Elena Schiavo, considered one of the forerunners of the women’s football movement in Italy. And yet, her name remains little known to the general public. A historical injustice, considering all she did in the 1960s to bring the ball to the feet of Italian girls.
Born in Turin in 1945, Elena Schiavo was one of the main protagonists of the very first unofficial Italian women’s national team, born in a time of protest and rupture with the sports establishment. In 1968, in an Italy still rigidly macho and conservative, Schiavo took to the field representing a dream bigger than herself: that of a generation of women who wanted to play, compete, and win. Not for fashion, not for provocation, but for something simply called passion. The same passion that had led her, still very young, to defy bans and lace up football boots. No small thing.
Captain, leader, symbol: the face of an era that was wrongly never told
In 1969, Elena Schiavo became captain of the Italian women’s national team that took part in the unofficial World Cup held in Mexico. It was a chaotic, self-financed expedition, with no support from the FIGC or CONI, but carried out with the spirit of a true sporting feat. The Italian girls didn’t give up and made it to the final, in front of 100,000 spectators at the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, against Denmark. They lost, but they became legend. No other Italian national team, male or female, had reached such a milestone in a world competition until then.
Schiavo was the voice and soul of that team. On the pitch, she was a midfielder with great tactical intelligence; off the pitch, she was the leader who kept together girls from different social backgrounds, all united by the desire to break the mold. In an interview years later, she said: “They laughed at us, looked at us with condescension. But we just wanted to play football. And we did it—against everything and everyone.”
The paradox is that, despite the resonance of the event, that national team was forgotten by official history. No recognition, no medals, no place in school or sports textbooks. But their presence, under Elena Schiavo’s leadership, was without a doubt the first true sign that women’s football existed—and would return. And it did, up to what we can see today, and hopefully far beyond.
Women’s football owes her a lot (even if it doesn’t know it)
After retiring, Elena Schiavo remained involved in the world of sport, but without receiving the attention she undoubtedly deserved. No street named after her, no national documentary, no official mention or celebration for the first captain of Italian women’s football. And yet, every time a little girl signs up for a football school today, her gesture carries a fragment of that gentle, determined rebellion that Schiavo embodied. It’s the classic case of someone who sowed in silence and saw a garden bloom that she might never get to truly walk through.
Telling her story today is not just a tribute—it’s a necessary and rightful cultural act. Because no future, not even that of a sport, can be built without knowing the past and its foundations. And those foundations, in Italy, also carry the name of Elena Schiavo.
By Marta Elena Casanova
