“At the moment, I believe that in football, possibly, the situation is even worse than in other sports and in the overall society,” said Giorgia Giovannetti, an economics professor at the University of Florence who has studied gender equality in the workplace. “It is a field where sexism still prevails.”

A spokeswoman for Italy’s soccer federation declined to answer specific questions about women’s soccer, writing in an email that all information about the game was available on the federation’s website.

Patrizia Panico, a veteran of Italy’s national women’s team since the 1990s who remains, at 41, a top player for Fiorentina, said: “We are still far behind in Italy on many social progresses. Obviously this movement could have some acceleration if main institutions took a stance on female football as well, but so far it is just Fiorentina. Will others follow? We don’t know.”

The growth of women’s soccer is an issue that has increasingly received attention globally, with FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, increasing its financial investment and pushing national associations to make the game’s growth more of a priority. And women’s teams have recently shown themselves more willing to fight for their share of the pie; Australia’s federation was forced to pull out of two games against the United States amid a labor dispute with its players in the fall, and the World Cup-winning American team is embroiled in a lawsuit of its own with U.S. Soccer.