Football saved her. Ludmila Da Silva (Brazil, 1994) repeats it every time she has the opportunity and it is not a cliché or a metaphor: “If football had not crossed my path, my path could have been that of my sister or one of my friends.” ”. Drugs, traffickers and a traumatic and premature death. Da Silva, protagonist of this episode of LALIGA VS, a project to eradicate hatred inside and outside the stadiums, was born in a favela, her mother could not take care of her and she went through an orphanage, until her aunt took her out of there. . “Coming from the favela and being black, it is not easy to find work or imagine a way out.” But then, as she tells the journalist and writer Lucía Taboada, someone saw her playing and insisted that she try escolinha. He impressed even playing against boys and at the age of 15 he made his professional debut. Soon the changes would come, the new path: the calls with the national team, meeting idols like Marta or Formiga and, suddenly, Europe: Atlético de Madrid. “I never imagined that football could bring me to such a beautiful place, I had to make the decision from one day to the next but I had to say yes. “This is another reality.”
The red and white forward is already a veteran, she has experienced the explosion of women’s football in Spain and is aware of her potential. The Spanish team is world champion, League F has grown thanks to the sale of audiovisual and commercial rights to become one of the five best women’s championships on the planet in just two years. But in her six seasons in Spain not everything has been rosy for Da Silva.
“Racist insults affect psychologically: you try to prevent your football from suffering but then you come home and cry. “What hurts the most is when you see children committing racist acts, with their parents by their side.” With Taboada, another football lover (and Celta, and probably not in that order), she reviews some of the episodes she has experienced, including chases in the supermarket.
“Spain is a racist country. But there is racism here like there is in Brazil or the United States. What happens is that right now here we are focusing on the problem,” says Da Silva. Furthermore, he is clear about what he wants for the future: “If anything has the power to sweep away racism, it is football. Millions and millions follow him. I hope to soon see stadiums full of women!”
The Monitor for the Observation of Hate in Sports
LALIGA has developed a tool that independently monitors the conversation on social networks and audits the level of hate and racism spread around Spanish professional football: one more step in its efforts to detect and eradicate violence and hate speech in football and in society. Every day and using a semantic engine with more than 50,000 linguistic rules and artificial intelligence algorithms, MOOD tracks up to 800,000 messages, calculating metrics that allow the fan to evaluate the progress of our football in this fight week by week.
The tool that measures the level of hate in conversations around football day by day
CREDITS
Of the project Juan Antonio Carbajo (Editorial coordination) | Adolfo Domenech (Design Coordination) | Daniel Domínguez (Editor) | Alejandro Martín (Editor) | Juan Sánchez (Design) | Rodolfo Mata (Development)
Of the video Quique Oñate (Realization) | Paula Díaz Molero (Editing)
From the audio Elia Fernández Granados (Executive production) | Laura Escarza (Script and production) | Dani Gutiérrez (Sound editing)
With the collaboration of LALIGA Anastasia Llorens, Dúnia Martín, Margherita Bertuol and María Lapeña.
