São Paulo – A week ago, football coach Lindsay Camila arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to lead the Ittihad Ladies Club, the women’s team of the country’s most popular club, Al Ittihad. She is still adapting to her new home but says she’s already noticed a desired from the Saudis to invest in growing and professionalizing the sport and obtaining good results on both women’s and men’s football fields.
Before coaching football teams, Campinas-born Camila was a player herself. She played in Brazil, Portugal, Spain and France. She left the fields in 2006 due to an injury and has since focused on coaching. In 2012, she coached boys at a football club in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which was her first experience in the Arab world.
Results in Brazilian football, projection abroad
She had two stints as assistant coach of the Brazilian women’s national football team – first from 2019 to 2021 and most recently from 2023 to 2024. She was coach at São Paulo state’s clubs Jaguariúna and Ferroviária, as well as Atlético Mineiro and Bahia, which she left to take over Ittihad. She was the first Brazilian coach to win Copa Libertadores, with Ferroviária in 2021.
The chance to coach Ittihad came in the first half of the year, through manager Jorge Rodrigues, who’d previously tried to take her to Mexico. “We talked [with Ittihad], and it was a good offer, not just money-wise, but the club’s project to structure out women’s football was sound,” she says. Camila said football has been increasingly professionalized in the Arab country and has even taken talents from other professions. Her team features players who have backgrounds in medicine and accounting.
She doesn’t have any Brazilian athletes in her team yet but plans on soon bringing people who already know her work at her side. Meanwhile, she’s working on the Saudi championship preseason. On Saturday (24), she and her athletes will travel for a 20-day season in Spain. The tournament runs from September 26 to May 2025.
Both in Brazil and Saudi Arabia, she says, there’s been a growing investment in women’s football. Her challenges in Brazil, Camila says, included small infrastructure, which increased as she took over positions at the national team, Ferroviária, Atlético Mineiro, and particularly at Bahia. At Ittihad, the team has a very professional infrastructure that used to be from the men’s team, including gym and locker rooms.
“We have access to a very good field, all materials, wardrobe, three physiotherapists, two assistant coaches, a physiologist, a fitness trainer. So all the club infrastructure I had in Brazil, I found it here,” she says. She says she’s still adapting and meeting people but wants to “work hard” and share her knowledge and experience with Ittihad on and off the field
“What I always say wherever I go is that I’m going to give my all to get good results. If they come, wonderful, and even if they don’t, I try to leave a seed of what was done,” says Camila. On the experience of working in Saudi Arabia, the new head coach of Ittihad says her first week has been great.
Read more:
Women’s football: A Brazilian named Al Ittihad coach
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
