Mexico fields first women’s blind football team, Chilangas FC heads to Brazil for Women’s Blind Football American Championship, Paralympics funding gap leaves development to local organisers

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Blind football uses a specialised ball with internal rattles to allow players to track its movements [Mark Viales/Al Jazeera]Blind football uses a specialised ball with internal rattles to allow players to track its movements [Mark Viales/Al Jazeera] aljazeera.com

aljazeera.com

Pau Hernandez joins hands with her teammates as the Chilangas FC celebrates a win during a Mexico City tournament [Mark Viales/Al Jazeera]Pau Hernandez joins hands with her teammates as the Chilangas FC celebrates a win during a Mexico City tournament [Mark Viales/Al Jazeera] aljazeera.com

Mexico will send its first women’s blind football team to an international tournament next month, according to an Al Jazeera longform published on August 15. The squad, Chilangas FC, is preparing to compete in the Women’s Blind Football American Championship in Brazil, after several years of building a player base in Mexico City. The sport is played five-a-side with a ball fitted with internal rattles, while players wear solid-black eye masks to standardise vision.

The team’s existence highlights how disability sport often grows in the gaps left by formal funding systems rather than through them. Al Jazeera reports that women’s blind football remains outside the Paralympic Games, unlike the men’s version which debuted in 2004, and that the lack of Paralympic inclusion limits development money worldwide. In practice that means coaches, facilities and travel budgets have to be assembled locally, one practice session at a time, even in a country where football is a mass-market industry.

Al Jazeera frames Chilangas FC as both an athletic project and a social workaround: a way for visually impaired women to claim public space in a culture saturated with football fandom but not necessarily structured for their participation. Polling cited in the piece suggests football dominates Mexican sports preferences, while the women building this team are still negotiating basics such as access to training partners and competitive matches. The club was founded in 2020 by coach Wendy del Rio, who had experience with Mexico City’s blind men’s team and saw that the women had no equivalent pathway; the pandemic then slowed early momentum.

The players’ accounts in the report describe barriers that are not solved by enthusiasm alone: varying degrees of sight among teammates, the need for specialised equipment, and the organisational load of turning informal interest into a roster ready for international play. The team’s tournament entry also exposes how recognition works in sport: national representation can arrive before stable domestic leagues, and international fixtures can become the lever that forces local institutions to take a programme seriously.

Chilangas FC will travel to Brazil to play in a continental championship before women’s blind football has a place in the Paralympics, and before Mexico has much of an ecosystem behind them. Their ball already makes noise; the question is whether anyone with a budget is listening.