Football club sparks outrage after agreeing deal with escort website to sponsor women's team

Fans of a top-flight football club in Brazil have reacted with fury to news that an 'escort agency' will sponsor the women's team.

Bahia club Vitoria has already partnered with adult website Fatal Model to sponsor their men's team until the end of 2025 and announced on Monday that the company will become the primary sponsor of the women's team too.

According to news outlet A Tarde, the partnership began in 2023 and Vitoria members voted down a proposal to rename the club Fatal Model Vitoria later the same year.

There was also a proposal tabled for the website to acquire the naming rights for Vitoria's Manoel Barras Stadium for a period of ten years. That conversation reportedly fizzled out last year and Fatal Model has instead agreed to sponsor the women's team.

Irrespective of the relative merits or otherwise of Fatal Model's line of business and its place in the men's game, the moral complications of its sponsorship of the women's team at Vitoria speak for themselves.

Women's football has a role to play in the opening up of the global sport to female participants and supporters, and the message Vitoria, who count David Luiz, Dida and Hulk among their former stars, has sent to young girls with an interest in the game is questionable at best.

Unsurprisingly, the response on social media has been mixed but strong objections to the controversial sponsorship agreement have been raised.

David Luiz began his senior career at Vitoria. (Image: Getty)

"An online prostitution company will sponsor the WOMEN'S Vitoria team," wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter. "Man, this is wrong on so many levels."

Another user predicted that the deal will be short-lived, musing that "In the end, the sponsorship will be cancelled due to rejection and Fatal Model comes out once again with engagement (I think that's the big goal here) while Vitoria ends up with bad engagement."

The economic environment in which such a sponsorship is possible came under the microscope of another X user.

"Fatal Model sponsoring the Vitoria women's team is the rawest expression of late capitalism," they posted.

"Everything becomes a commodity, including a woman's body. When sport only finds support in this kind of exploitation, it's not freedom. It's a symptom of a system in moral and ethical decay."