After having dated since they first became teammates in 2017, Toni Deion Pressley and Marta Vieira da Silva announced they were officially engaged on Monday.
Both soccer players posted to Instagram a series of engagement photos together displaying their wedding rings, which Marta captioned, “This is another chapter of the story that we are writing together.”
Pressley simply commented, “Yes. 🥰”
Marta is widely considered one of the greatest soccer players of all time, and last year she became the first player — man or woman — to score in five different FIFA World Cups. Both Marta and Pressley play together for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride, which recently welcomed back Pressley after she overcame her breast cancer diagnosis last year.
Once married, Marta and Pressley will become the second lawfully wedded couple currently playing on the Orlando Pride, joining the U.S. women’s national team stars Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris, who married one another one year ago.
As SB Nation’s Stephanie Yang wrote in All For XI, “It feels like this would have been unimaginable ten, maybe even five, years ago. Players stay in the closet for a variety of reasons, a lot of them societal and systemic.”
“But as more players have come out, the landscape has changed. Players are kissing their girlfriends in the stands during World Cups in front of hundreds of cameras. Marta’s own NT teammate Cristiane got married and is having a baby with her partner. The years when LGBTQ female players went to such great lengths to obscure their identities to the point where even privately whispering about it between individuals felt hushed and taboo – those years grow increasingly distant. Some players still do today, but you get the sense that more and more, it’s coming from a simple desire to remain private rather than out of fear. And that’s what we’ve been striving for, isn’t it? The ability to make our announcements without hesitation or fear and to be celebrated and loved the same as anyone else.”
Congratulations, Marta and Toni from all of us at Outsports!
Follow Marta (@amorpelamarta) on Instagram by clicking here, and for her fianceé Toni Deion Pressley (@tonideion), click here.
