Racheal Kundananji was just 17 when she showed up to practice with her first-ever soccer team wearing track spikes.
Until then, track and field was the only organized sport she had known in the Zambian copper-mining region where she grew up. Now she was sprinting around a bumpy patch of dirt that seemed more suitable for off-road biking than for soccer, displaying skills as rugged as the field itself.
“She would run very fast,” said Risto Mupaka, a coach of the team, Konkola Queens. But, he added, “turning was a problem.”
It didn’t take her long to figure out the game. After only four practices, Kundananji played her first match. She scored three goals.
Seven years since that debut, Kundananji, 24, will lead Zambia’s national team into the Paris Olympics carrying a title that those who knew her at 17 could have scarcely believed: She is now one of the most valuable women’s soccer players on the planet.
That label was hung on her in February, after she joined Bay F.C. of the National Women’s Soccer League in a deal that included a world-record transfer fee and a contract that could eventually pay her $2.5 million.
Kundananji’s ascent, like many of her runs at goal, has been perfectly timed as she has ridden a wave of investment and interest in women’s soccer that have lifted the sport’s profile across the world. But her success has also created opportunities and hope for women’s players in Africa, which continues to lag behind Europe and North America in providing resources and gaining respect for its rising talent. Many parents on the continent historically have nudged their daughters toward marriage and homemaking, not bicycle kicks and diving headers.
“I was like, ‘OK, since she can play, I can also play,” said Dainess Mupaka, who played with Kundananji on Konkola. “I was encouraged. I was motivated. She is an inspiration to everyone here in Zambia.”
Since Kundananji’s deal with Bay F.C., a team in the San Francisco Bay Area, was announced, coaches in Zambia — a heavily indebted nation reliant on mining and agriculture — say the number of girls wanting to play has shot up. And, for a change, their families are urging them on.
“Parents are coming to realize this game is a way out of poverty,” said Chuka Onwumechili, the author of “Women’s Football in Africa,” which was published this month. “This is really an opening that’s needed because this basically puts a high value on African talent.”
An easygoing jokester with a gaptoothed smile as electric as her bleached hair, Kundananji initially didn’t tell her mother, Eness Nambela Ng’ona, that she had joined a team. But her mother found out the truth through a friend.
“I didn’t want to discourage any of my children, whatever they chose to do,” said Nambela Ng’ona, who has four other children and worked various jobs in mines. “I knew that women can do something in life.”
Women’s soccer began growing in Zambia in the early 1980s, said Hikabwa D. Chipande, who is the head of the African Union sports council and has researched the history of women’s soccer in Zambia. Some of the strongest opportunities were in the north-central Copperbelt Province, where Kundananji is from, in large part because government-owned mines were directed to invest heavily in social amenities like sports clubs; Konkola Queens, for example, are backed by the Konkola Copper Mines.
But when a new government came to power in the early 1990s, the mines shifted to private ownership, and many, already reeling from a dip in copper prices, scaled back their investments in sports.
“The most vulnerable in the order of priority was women’s leagues and women’s sports,” Mr. Chipande said. “Women’s clubs really almost disappeared.”
When Kundananji joined the national team in 2018, only one member played professionally full time. Now 13 do, according to Annie Nams, the head of the women’s division of the Zambian soccer association. The national team, which played in the Women’s World Cup for the first time last year, now packs stadiums in Zambia and receives government funding. Zambia started its first nationwide women’s soccer league three years ago.
Kundananji may not even be Zambia’s brightest female soccer star. Her Olympic teammate Barbra Banda joined the Orlando Pride in America a month after Kundananji’s signing and is currently tied for the N.W.S.L. scoring lead, with 12 goals in 12 games.
“We’ve got good talent,” Kundananji said. “We just need funds that’s from the grass roots. Young girls are looking up to us who are here already, but we want them to have everything that we never had.”
Kundananji joined Konkola Queens, which played in a provincial league in the Copperbelt, because they were close to her mother’s low-slung, box-shaped home in the town of Chililabombwe.
An important lesson came early, during a game when Kundananji threatened to beat up an opponent and was admonished by the opposing coach, Wisdom Kaira.
“You are a good player,” shouted Kaira, who would later recommend Kundananji to national team officials. “You can travel all around the world if you just work on your temper.”
That message inspired a belief that she could make soccer a career, Kundananji said, even though she had to work as a welder because Konkola did not offer a salary.
“Some girls were asking me, ‘Why do you play as if they are paying you?’” Kundananji said. “I was like, ‘I’m targeting something big.’”
More goals led to more opportunity. In 2018, a club owned by a petroleum refinery, Indeni Roses, was the first team to pay a transfer fee for Kundananji — 3,000 kwacha, about $300 at the time. It also was the first to pay her a soccer salary: $70 a month, with a $50 bonus for wins. The club gave her a raise after her teammates demanded she receive more because she was so good.
A call to join Zambia’s national team paved the way for her to make the leap to Europe in 2019: first to Kazakhstan, and eventually to two teams in Spain. In her first season with Madrid C.F.F., she finished second in the league in scoring, with 25 goals in 29 games. That breakout year came just as officials at Bay F.C., an expansion team building its first roster, were searching for a striker.
Impressed by what it saw, the club agreed to pay Madrid $788,000 to acquire the rights to Kundananji. It was the highest transfer fee ever paid for a female player.
So far, Kundananji’s performance with Bay F.C. has not gone as she hoped. She has scored only two goals in 12 appearances, a reflection, she says, of the adjustments needed as she and her teammates get used to each other on the field.
She is also adjusting to wealth and rising stardom. Kundananji struggles to say no to loved ones seeking support, said Bernadette Deka-Zulu, the co-founder of the Racheal Kundananji Legacy Foundation, which aims to empower girls through sports, education and community development.
At the opening of her foundation this month in Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, Kundananji — who used to shed tears because she couldn’t afford soccer shoes and was mocked at her first national team camp because of her tattered clothes — turned up in a glamorous, full-length black coat and oversize sunglasses. She stepped to a podium on the sideline of a soccer field to address dozens of aspiring children and local dignitaries and admitted that she was out of her element.
“I’m a little nervous,” she said, before reading haltingly from a sheet of paper.
It was only when she looked up and departed from her prepared remarks — like a striker pivoting on instinct — that Kundananji began to speak more confidently.
The moment epitomized what loved ones say has made her career successful: an unrelenting belief in herself. It also might be why the upcoming Olympics don’t seem to scare her.
“Zambia is one of a kind,” Kundananji said. “We are going to leave a mark.”
Rabecca Lungu contributed reporting from Lusaka.
