Michelle Ramalho has been president of the Paraibana Football Federation since 2018, where she began to focus her work on training referees. At the time he took over, football in Paraíba was the target of Operation Cartola, which investigated a scheme to manipulate results in the state championship.
Now at CBF, the vice-president has carried out the same project. “When I joined, I created a school to attract and train new referees, I created a new refereeing system for Paraíba. Today, I’m very happy because my referees spent three years without refereeing in any national championship and today they are already in Series A. My goal is that I can train a FIFA referee and we will do that. The process of modernizing arbitration at the CBF is truly enchanting. It’s work that we are sowing to be able to harvest in the future.”
The first woman elected to the position, she takes the opportunity to highlight that Brazilian football – and the CBF – is not “just” the main men’s team. “It’s a predominantly male world, as I always say, but it’s not a sexist world and we need to have more women. We see more and more women taking up space, we see managers, we see women themselves in women’s football also taking up space. We were runners-up in the Olympics, we were also now champions of the Copa América, which makes us very proud.”
