A name cropped up in the news this week that rang a bell. Stefany Ferrer Van Ginkel is, after all, one you’d be unlikely to forget.
There was just a vague memory of her being a footballer who had the grimmest of starts in life, but had managed to build a good one for herself thanks largely to her sporting talent.
It was, as it proved, hard to find that side of her life, it being buried deep on Google under an endless string of articles about this week’s news. But, finally, there was the Forbes piece by Asif Burhan from two years ago where her story was first spotted. And some story it was too.
She was born in a favela in the Brazilian city of Campo Grande, one of three sisters. Her 20-year-old mother was a drug addict who was unable to care for her kids. The girls’ grandmother took over for a spell, but couldn’t afford to look after them, so they were placed in an orphanage when Ferrer Van Ginkel was just three.
It was a harrowing experience for them all, their mother often visiting the orphanage and screaming “give my kids back” from outside. The authorities moved the sisters to another institution far from her home so she couldn’t visit them again.
Larissa, the eldest, rejected any effort to have them adopted unless they were kept together, an insistence that prolonged their stay in the orphanage. Eventually, a couple living in the Spanish village of Argençola, an hour from Barcelona, offered all three girls a new life. Their adopted father was Francesc Ferrer-Alegre, their adopted mother Astrid Van Ginkel, from where Stefany took her name.
She has only happy memories of her life with Francesc and Astrid, describing the new life they offered to her and her sisters as their “golden ticket”.
“We were so lucky that they were such kind people,” she recalled.
But she struggled outside her new home.
“I was an angry kid. I would say bad things to people. I would be really aggressive.”
But football, she said, saved her.
“I couldn’t speak the language, so I couldn’t communicate with people, I couldn’t make friends. I would just go to football practice, that was my way to connect with people. Football was like my medicine.”
It helped that she was good at it. Good enough to be invited for a trial at Barcelona, although that opportunity was lost because there was no transport for her to the city, her adopted parents both at work at the time. But she got a second chance with Espanyol, scoring 49 goals in the season that saw them promoted to Spain’s second division.
That helped earn her a scholarship to West Virginia University where her life in the United States began in 2017. Her football career there was solid, if not spectacular, but she left with a degree in sports management and an ambition to play the game professionally.
Her failure to be selected in the NWSL draft looked to have put the kibosh on that dream, but she was alerted to the BT Sport series Ultimate Goal which offered female players the chance to showcase their talents and, hopefully, earn themselves a professional contract with a club.
It worked. She impressed sufficiently in the series to be offered a contract by Mexican champions Tigres in 2021, becoming their first foreign signing, and come January 2022, she got the move of her dreams, to Los Angeles’ Angel City in the NWSL.
By then they had appointed Eni Aluko as their sporting director, the former England international having worked on Ultimate Goal as a coach. She was, then, familiar with Ferrer Van Ginkel’s abilities.
“Stef stood out to me immediately, just her athleticism, her pace, her skill,” she said. The signing attracted no little attention at the time because it was believed to have been the first transfer paid for with cryptocurrency.
Thereafter? Downhill. She struggled for game time at the club that is owned by a string of stars, among them Serena Williams, Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Natalie Portman and Eva Longoria. In November of last year, they opted not to renew her contract, and she hasn’t played professional football since.
Soon after, she posted a video of herself on one of her many social media accounts.
“Hello, my name is Stefany, I’m a professional soccer player and I’m going to be living in a car for the next month and I’m going to be finding side hustles in LA to get money to eat.”
It was as if she’d ended up back where she started in life.
But along with another former professional footballer, Afghanistan-born Samim Haydari, she was trying to rebuild her life, the pair setting up a soccer camp for girls.
And then a seven-second video clip that went viral earlier this week saw their worlds collapse around them.
Driving past a pro-Israel rally in Beverly Hills, they slowed down, had an inaudible exchange with a group of people, at which point a grinning Ferrer Van Ginkel made a Nazi salute in their direction. “Shame on you,” they shouted back.
The StopAntisemitism account tweeted – or X’ed – the clip and asked for the pair to be identified. Soon enough, they were. The opprobrium was, understandably, severe. “SEND HER BACK TO BRAZIL,” the gist.
Angel City soon followed up with a statement distancing themselves from her, pointing out that she hasn’t been “affiliated with the club since November 2022″. By then, the pair had deleted the bulk of their social media accounts.
They later issued a video apology, although Haydari did all the talking, Ferrer Van Ginkel remaining silent.
“I know we have approached the situation with hate and made it worse with our actions,” he said. “We acted childish . . . all we can do is become better and learn a lesson from this. We cannot change the past.”
You’d suspect they won’t be able to change their futures either, their lives in the States well and truly destroyed by a moment of complete madness. As a lonely voice of reason put it on Twitter, “people ruin their lives for nothing, it’s terrible. There was absolutely no reason for her to have done that”.
A while back, Ferrer Van Ginkel reflected on her life and how she’s taken on the toughest of times.
“I always put myself in places where it’s hard,” she said. “I don’t want it to be easy. I like challenges.”
Her biggest challenge is, perhaps, about to come.
