Olympics: Brazil legend, all-time top scorer Marta to retire from international football after Paris games
- Six-time World Player of the Year and first player to score at five straight Olympic Games and World Cup finals
- Twice Olympic silver medallist, including in Beijing, she has 116 goals in 175 appearances for Selecao
Marta, Brazil’s all-time top goal scorer, announced she will retire from international football at the end of the year.
The six-time Fifa World Player of the Year has made 175 appearances for the Selecao and scored 116 times.
Now 38, she made her international debut in 2002 but announced her Brazil career will end after 22 years.
“If I go to the Olympics [in Paris], I will enjoy every moment because, independent of whether I go or not, this will be my last year with the national team,” she told CNN Brasil.
“There will be no more Marta for the Brazil national team from 2025, I can confirm this.”
Often regarded as the best women’s footballer ever, Marta is a pioneer in the sport and dominated the game in terms of personal awards in the late 2000s.
She won five World Player of the Year awards in a row from 2006 to 2010, finishing on the podium in five of the next six years before winning it again in 2018.
Despite dominating the game on a personal level, the biggest honours on the international stage have so often eluded her with a golden period in the mid-to-late-2000s leading so several heartbreaking defeats.
At the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, Brazil were agonisingly beaten 2-1 after extra time by the United States in the gold medal match, with Marta netting three along the way.
Then, three years later, they reached the World Cup final in China for the first – and so far only – time, but lost 2-0 to Germany in Shanghai.
Marta, who won the Golden Ball, Golden Boot and scored the Goal of the Tournament, netted a brace which saw them at least exact revenge against the US with a thumping 4-0 win in the semi-finals.
At the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Marta and Co. again reached the gold medal match with a trilogy against the US and again it was the Americans who broke Brazilian hearts with a 1-0 victory in extra time.
In 2016, there was extra pressure with the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, but Brazil lost in the semi-finals in a penalty shoot-out to Sweden, despite Marta netting her spot kick – and then went down 2-1 to Canada in the bronze medal match.
In 2023, Brazil suffered a shock as they crashed out of the World Cup at the group stage, as a tearful Marta told reporters after the match than “not even in my worst nightmares was it the World Cup I dreamed of”, as the realisation she would never grace that stage again hit home.
Marta is the only woman to score at five World Cup finals and at five consecutive Olympic Games – and could yet make it six in Paris.
At club level, she won the Uefa Women’s Cup – a forerunner to the Uefa Women’s Champions League – in 2004 with Swedish side Umea IK and the Copa Libertadores Femenino in 2009 while at Santos.
Since 2017, she has been in the National Women’s Soccer League in the US with Orlando Pride.
