Next generation: Brazil Women ready to build on legends’ achievements

Welcome to Moving the Goalposts, the Guardian’s new (and free) women’s football newsletter. Here’s an extract from this week’s edition. To receive the full version once a week, just pop your email in below:

“You never know if they’re ready, but you have to believe,” Pia Sundhage said recently. The Brazil coach was talking about her squad for the friendlies against Denmark and Sweden later this month, games that will be followed by the Copa América. The Swedish manager has been in charge of the Brazilian women’s national team for the past three years and leading them through a rebuilding process.

Having relied heavily on veterans such as Marta, Cristiane and Formiga to win seven out of eight Copas, this will be the first major tournament without any of them in a long, long time. Now younger players such as Kerolin, Geyse, Tainara and Giovana Queiroz have to pick up the baton.

“Yes, I feel this responsibility,” the 22-year-old North Carolina Courage midfielder Kerolin tells Moving the Goalposts. She is looking forward to the tournament, and not having some of her idols on the pitch will encourage her to look back at their legacy and what they achieved. “It also motivates us to keep them close, even from afar,” she says. “We’re always communicating and learning from them. It’s only fair that we do the same they did for the women’s game.”

The manager of the U-20 Brazilian national team, Jonas Urias, works closely with Sundhage to make sure there is a pathway for the best talents to reach the senior side. He says that the main challenge is to nurture the same toughness in this generation that the previous one had. “Previous generations were forced to be resilient to survive in an extremely hostile and prejudiced environment,