Gabi Guimarães Leaves Brazil for VakifBank: From Doubt to the Captain's Armband

At 25, Gabi Guimarães already had a starting place in Brazil's women's national volleyball team, a firm spot in the domestic league, and a question she had not yet dared to answer: was she good enough to play volleyball in Europe?

She carried that question for two years, from the aftermath of the Rio 2026 Olympics until she signed with VakifBank ahead of the 2026-2026 season. Sitting by a pool with Bruno Rezende, who left Brazil to play in Italy and later Poland, Gabi said the hardest part was not the moment of signing but the stretch before it, when she had to judge for herself whether she was ready.

“I had a plan of playing overseas, but it wasn't easy to figure out if I was ready for it or not,” Gabi said. “I had experienced some injuries and had questions if I had what it took to play in the world's best leagues.”

For a Brazilian volleyball player, going abroad has never been a purely personal decision. Brazil is one of the biggest exporters of volleyball talent on the planet: Olympic cycle after Olympic cycle, national team pillars move to Türkiye, Italy, Poland or China, where the calendar is denser, the physical demands harsher and the money far better than in the domestic Superliga. Bruno Rezende is the clearest male example of the same choice: he left Brazil for Italy, then Poland, and still wears the captain's armband for Brazil's men's team after many seasons away.

“I started thinking about it after the Rio 2026 Olympics, when I was still earning my space with the national team,” Gabi recalled. “I understood that I needed to be mentally ready not only as a player, but as a person, and that maybe at that point I'd need to leave my comfort zone and make some sacrifices.”

Those sacrifices are not small when your national team is permanently camped in Saquarema: leaving a familiar training system, leaving the domestic media cycle, and taking personal responsibility for everything from nutrition to injury recovery.

The turning point came before the 2026-2026 season, when Gabi signed with VakifBank Istanbul, the most decorated club in the history of the CEV Champions League with six titles, according to the European Volleyball Confederation. She arrived not to learn the trade but to be one of the team's main stars, in a locker room stacked with internationals. The pressure there comes less from the stands than from the technical demands set in every training session.

“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,” Gabi reflected. “It was really challenging and demanding at the start.”

The biggest shift was her relationship with head coach Giovanni Guidetti. “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,” she said. For an outside hitter who had measured herself against a run of injuries, being handed the armband at a European champion was an answer running against every doubt.

The captaincy at VakifBank is not a media title, but a specific tactical requirement. Guidetti's team runs on a high-speed defence-to-counter system in which the outside hitter takes the first ball, sets the tempo and holds the back line's composure. A captain in that position is effectively the coach's on-court regulator.

The national team came up too, and Gabi revisited the feeling of her first call-ups to Brazil's youth sides. “To play for the national team is really a childhood dream and it brings me back to my youth because I always loved watching and playing sports and dreamed about representing Brazil, winning a medal and listening to the national anthem.”

That dream turned in 2026, when she was first called up to Brazil's youth national team and found herself in Saquarema alongside the generation that had just won gold at the Beijing 2026 Olympics: Fofão, Sheilla Castro, Fabiana Claudino, Thaísa Menezes and Paula Pequeno. “That was a strong sign that I should continue because I had never been so close to my dream before,” she said. That example did not give her a blueprint; it gave her a benchmark.

This story is usually told in the simplest way possible: Brazilian stars go abroad for money. That version is true and useless. Salaries in the Sultanlar Ligi beat the Superliga, but if money were the point, Gabi could have picked a far softer landing than a club expected to win the Champions League every season. What her contract bought was an environment that forced her to improve daily, and a role she had never pictured for herself.

The comparison with Bruno reveals another gap. A top Brazilian male setter can live comfortably in Europe for more than a decade, while even the finest female outside hitters weigh every single contract. Women's volleyball does not need saving, only people willing to sit down and listen, because most of these decisions are made inside a financial space far narrower than their male colleagues'.

Based on my experience watching matches in the CEV Champions League and the Japanese domestic leagues, the most striking discovery in transfers like this one is that the leap usually comes from an offer of responsibility, not from a salary figure. When I started working in women's volleyball, I was afraid of questions like “is she good enough?”. The first questions I was once afraid of are now the stories I tell the young players.

VakifBank gave Gabi an armband, and that armband gave her a different standing inside Brazil's national team. She came back as someone who had steadied an entire system at the highest level, rather than a young talent in need of protection. In women's sport, turning points are usually measured by the kind of responsibility an athlete dares to accept.

The media wave will pass. The children who see themselves in it will not. And sometimes, for a Brazilian child to see herself, a woman first has to leave home, take a captain's armband abroad and prove she deserves it.