Gabi on leaving Brazil: VakifBank, Guidetti and the captaincy she never imagined

Beside a swimming pool, Gabriela Guimaraes recounted the story of leaving Brazil. She opened with a line worth underlining: "I had a plan of playing overseas, but it wasn't easy to figure out if I was ready for it or not." Next to her sat Bruno Rezende, who had walked that road earlier and further. I copied the sentence into my notebook and circled the word "plan". An outside hitter at the peak age of her career spoke about moving abroad as a plan, not a dream, and that small detail says a great deal about how Brazilian women's volleyball sees itself. Gabi did not talk about the glamour of VakifBank. She talked about injuries, about the questions she asked herself after Rio 2026, and about the moment she understood she had to leave her comfort zone if she wanted to keep moving forward. In seventeen years of watching women's volleyball, I have learned that the most valuable part of a sports story usually sits where players are not asked to speak. Gabi's path began in Saquarema. In 2026 she was called up to Brazil's youth national team and trained alongside the generation that had just won gold at the Beijing Olympics. "I played many sports before volleyball, but when I was first called up to Brazil's youth national team in 2026 and got to be in Saquarema alongside that incredible generation, that was a strong sign that I should continue, because I had never been so close to my dream before." For a fourteen-year-old girl, the distance between the stands and the training floor was a single door. For Brazilian women's volleyball, it was an entire mechanism of transmission: the golden generation sat there, trained there, and a child saw herself inside that frame. That detail is a small discovery, but I keep it, because many women's volleyball nations in the world lose exactly this moment — the moment a young player stands beside the person she wants to become. Eight years later, Rio 2026 ended for Brazil with a quarterfinal defeat to China on home soil. Gabi was still earning her minutes in the national team shirt. She said she began thinking about going abroad after that Olympics, when a run of injuries made her question whether she had what it took to play in the world's strongest leagues. She understood she needed to be ready mentally, not only as a player but as a person, and that perhaps she had to leave her comfort zone and make sacrifices to take the next step. Bruno Rezende sat there, a man who had spent years competing in Europe and had worn the shirts of clubs in Italy. Two Brazilians, two generations, one threshold. What struck me was how they spoke about fear: neither used the word courage. They used the word readiness. The season froze, but voices never freeze — and this is exactly the kind of voice I want to record, the voice of someone who has passed through self-doubt without romanticising it. Ahead of the 2026-2026 season, Gabi signed with VakifBank, one of the strongest clubs on the planet, joining as one of their main stars. "The scenario I found when I got there was mind-changing, as it showed me right from the start that I was getting into a whole other level of volleyball," she said. "It was really challenging and demanding at the start." She also spoke about Giovanni Guidetti: "I built a great relationship with Guidetti, and he was incredibly important for me. One of the first things he told me was that he wanted to prepare me to be the team captain, and I was shocked because I have never seen myself in that position." That sentence deserves a longer pause than it usually gets. Guidetti did not say he wanted her to score more, receive more balls or become the number one attacker. He spoke about the armband. In his system, the captain is the person who translates tactical intent into on-court language, who holds the structure when the game breaks, who can be handed the right to adjust between rallies without a timeout. An outside hitter wearing the armband means the team is organised around the axis of reception and attack, not around a commander standing outside the lines. It was a deliberate choice, not a symbolic gesture. I went back to Champions League footage of VakifBank to answer a narrow question: what did Guidetti see in Gabi that she had not yet seen in herself? The answer lay in rallies that never reach a box score — the rhythm of her steps after a teammate shanks a pass, the way she stood in the third position when the opponent shifted to an outside attack, the way she spoke to her setter between sets. Those things do not produce points. They produce stability, and stability is the only thing that lets a team of stars beat another team of stars. Here is the counter-intuitive turn. Stories of women athletes moving abroad are usually told through two measures: salary and trophies. Both are easy to count, easy to headline, easy to sell. The thing that actually changed during a year in Turkey sits outside both. It sits in the daily threshold: training with people who could beat you every morning, and learning not to shrink. That threshold appears in no contract and in no table. When media report a women's volleyball transfer, they measure the commercial value of a decision that is fundamentally about the limits of the self. It is worth saying plainly, to avoid romanticising: Gabi did not leave Brazil because she was abandoned, and she did not leave in the posture of someone who needed saving. She left with a plan, after weighing injuries, after asking herself whether she was enough. Doubt here is a driver, not a tragedy. Women's volleyball does not need saving, it needs someone willing to sit down and listen — and listening here means accepting that an athlete can be both a star of a major club and a person still searching for her own answers. Comparing Brazil and Turkey along this line is more useful than arguing which league is stronger. Brazil has a deep youth development base, a national team culture that runs deep, and Saquarema. Turkey has one of Europe's most demanding club environments, where every week is a final and every position has a replacement waiting. The two environments teach different skills: one teaches you to belong to a system, the other teaches you to survive inside one. People only grow when they are forced to learn both. The first questions I once feared are now the stories I tell young players. Early in my career I was afraid to ask a woman athlete whether she believed she was good enough, because I thought the question was insulting. Now I know it is a question many of them have asked themselves hundreds of times, and that having someone ask it seriously is a form of release. What I took away from that conversation beside the pool is not a transfer story. It is a timeline: a fourteen-year-old girl standing in the Saquarema gym watching a golden generation, then eleven years later standing in another gym in Istanbul being handed an armband she never imagined wearing. Between those two moments lie injuries, doubt and nights of self-questioning. The media wave will pass. The children who see themselves in it will not. The question I leave for myself, and for anyone following women's volleyball anywhere: if an outside hitter can become captain in Europe's most demanding system, then where we are sitting, who is waiting to be handed a role they have never imagined for themselves?