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Today we introduce you to the best player in women’s soccer  and one of its most electrifying performers – Marta Vieira da Silva!

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Kicking Off

Michael Sokolove, The New York Times

LATE IN THE SECOND HALF of a World Cup semifinal match against the United States in 2007, Marta Vieira da Silva, a Brazilian who is the best player in women’s soccer — and perhaps the most electrifying performer in the game, male or female — caught up to a pass and controlled it about 20 yards from the American goal. The crowd inside the stadium in the Chinese city Hangzhou roared, as soccer fans do any time Marta is near the ball, even when she has no obvious path forward. With her back to the goal and a defender pressing her, Marta lifted the ball into the air with her right foot, then poked it with her left heel past the U.S. player, who responded by haplessly trying to grab her uniform. Marta pirouetted on by — almost literally running a circle around her opponent — dribbled around another defender (who stumbled and nearly fell) and shot the ball past the goalkeeper.

“It’s what she does — she confuses you,” Brandi Chastain, a former star on the U.S. national team, told me. “You don’t know whether to chase her or the ball.” Earlier in the same game, Marta scored another goal after weaving through no fewer than six defenders. “Most players, when they’re under pressure from more than one defender, look to get rid of the ball as fast as they can,” Chastain said, adding that Marta “sees it as an opportunity to make something fabulous happen.”

In each of the last three years, Marta, who is just 23, was named the female player of the year by FIFA, the world governing body of soccer. (Like many other Brazilian athletes, she goes by her first name.) She is the only woman to have placed a footprint alongside those of Pelé and other greats outside the famed Estádio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro. For the last five seasons she has played for a top team in Sweden, but early this year, she moved to Southern California to join the new Women’s Professional Soccer league, which began play last week. (Marta’s team, the Los Angeles Sol, plays the New York-area franchise, Sky Blue F.C., at the TD Bank Ballpark in Bridgewater, N.J., today.) In the game programs, Marta will be listed as a forward, a prosaic term that hardly seems to do justice to her speed, determination and creativity. Better to think of her as an escape artist — both on the field and in the arc of her life.

In late February, Marta joined players selected from each of the seven teams to model their new uniforms in New York. She walked down a runway at an events space in Chelsea, wearing the blue home jersey of the Los Angeles Sol, smiling shyly and looking as if she would have been a lot more comfortable with a ball at her feet. The next morning, she told me how, in a span of just a half-dozen years, she made the journey out of her remote town in the northeast of Brazil, where few girls even played soccer, to the pinnacle of her sport. “I had to do all of it by myself,” she said through a Portuguese interpreter. (She speaks Swedish fluently and, according to her new teammates, is rapidly picking up English.) “There wasn’t anybody for me to follow, or anyone to say to me, These are the steps you must take. First of all, I was almost always the only girl playing with boys in a small town. Some boys accepted me, some didn’t. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?” More . . .

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Picture Credit: Dewey Nicks for The New York Times