Gabi, Bruno and the move away from Brazil: the turning point is a role, not a country

Beside a pool, Bruno Rezende and Gabi Guimarães sat down to talk about the period when both of them left Brazil to play abroad. For Gabi, the starting point was not a contract but a question she asked herself after Rio 2026: was she good enough to play in the strongest leagues on the planet? She had just come through injuries, was still fighting for a place in the national team, and she understood that moving forward might require leaving her own comfort zone.

Then she told a detail I value more than any advice about mentality. In one of the very first working sessions at VakifBank, head coach Giovanni Guidetti told her he wanted to prepare her to become team captain. She was shocked. “I have never seen myself in that position,” she said.

A player goes abroad to learn. She is handed the job of leading. The overseas story of Brazilian players is usually told as a tale of courage; here it is told as a question of role.

Context: from Saquarema to Istanbul

Gabi recalled that she played many sports before volleyball, and that the dream of wearing the national team shirt came early. In 2026 she was first called up to Brazil's youth national team and trained in Saquarema, at the same time as the generation that had just won gold at the Beijing 2026 Olympics was there. For a young girl, standing on the same training court as freshly crowned Olympic champions was a very clear signal: this path was real, not a daydream.

Eleven years later, for the 2026-2026 season, she signed with VakifBank, a club regarded as one of the strongest forces in women's volleyball. Gabi described the moment she arrived in one tight sentence: the scenario she found changed the way she saw everything, because from the very start it showed her she was stepping into a whole other level. The beginning was hard and demanding. In return, she built a strong relationship with Guidetti, whom she called hugely important for her career.

Bruno Rezende, sitting with her that day, is another who left Brazil to play in Italy. He is one of the finest setters Brazilian volleyball has produced, and he has lived exactly the feeling Gabi described: sitting in a locker room where nobody speaks your language, in a league where a different team can beat you every week.

Based on my experience of watching matches in the Turkish league and the Brazilian Superliga across many seasons, the gap between these two environments is not about the quality of the stars. It is about the pressure on every single touch of the ball.

What actually changes when you go abroad

Set the mentality story aside for a moment and look at what can be measured.

In the Brazilian Superliga, a leading outside hitter usually receives the ball under friendlier conditions: lower average serve speed, and a block that rarely commits three blockers. In Turkey, everything shifts the other way. Serves are harder, deeper, aimed at the seam between two receivers. The block is taller and tighter. The tempo is faster, which means a reception half a metre off pulls an entire chain of errors behind it.

For Gabi, who stands 1.76 metres, below the average of Europe's leading outside hitters, this change did not allow her to keep playing the old way. In Brazil she could be the main attacking weapon, taking high balls and hitting into familiar gaps. At VakifBank she had to shift her focus to other work first: stable serve reception, back-row defence, and attacking only when the system had already delivered the ball on the right rhythm.

In other words, her value moved from points scored to good touches made. Very few players can accept that shift, because it runs against the instincts of someone raised on the final ball.

Data does not lie, but it only answers the question you ask. If you ask a stats sheet “who scored the most points”, you will conclude Gabi was less effective in Turkey. If you ask “who kept the reception system from collapsing”, the answer flips completely. The same dataset, two opposite conclusions, simply because the question was different.

And this is where I want to linger: losing a ball does not kill you. Where you lose it does. An outside hitter who shanks a pass on the wing, when the ball is already outside the system, loses one point. The same player who shanks it in the middle of the court, right in front of the setter, takes both the block and the back row out of position, and the price is two or three points in a row. The location of the mistake matters more than the mistake. In a league where the margin between teams is two or three points per set, that is the whole difference.

The captain's armband as a tactical function

Back to Guidetti's sentence. Offering to prepare Gabi as captain was not a gesture of encouragement. It was a tactical decision.

On a volleyball court, the captain talks to the referee, but the real job is to be the relay station between the coaching staff and the six players on the floor. They call the blocking scheme for each opponent, adjust the reception line when the other side changes its serving direction, take the signal from the technical area and translate it into one short sentence teammates can absorb in three seconds.

To do that at VakifBank, a Brazilian player has to do three things at once: read the game in a working language that is not her mother tongue, understand Guidetti's defensive system down to the level of each footstep, and carry enough authority to say something nobody argues with while the team is losing.

That is why I think Gabi's hardest phase in Turkey was not learning to attack against a taller block. It was learning to speak up.

A few seasons later, she was VakifBank's captain, and the club won the CEV Champions League in the 2026-2026 season. Those results do not prove much about individual technique, but they confirm one thing: the system had accepted her in the new role.

The opposite view: going abroad does not automatically make you better

There is a widespread belief in volleyball, and in football too: go abroad and you improve. I do not buy it.

Every year hundreds of players leave home for stronger leagues, and most of them come back with exactly the same skill set, plus one extra line on their CV. What makes the difference is not the contract, but whether the new environment takes away the role you are used to.

Gabi improved because VakifBank did not let her keep her old role. If the Turkish club had used her purely as a scoring machine, letting her take high balls and hammer them down, she would have added a few trophies and probably learned nothing new. What changed her was being forced to become part of the system rather than its centre.

I learned to find the opponent's blind spot from my own. Working at a club, I once realised that what I could not see in the opposition was usually the same thing I could not see in my own team. A player who cannot see the weakness in her own reception will never spot it in the player opposite. A player who goes abroad and is handed a completely new role is forced to look at herself from scratch, and that is the real reward of leaving home, not the medal.

On the other side of the ledger, Gabi's story raises a difficult question for Brazilian clubs. When the best players leave to refine themselves abroad, the skills they acquire, receiving under pressure, back-row defence and reading the game, come back to serve the national team, while the domestic league gains nothing directly. It is a form of value export Brazilian volleyball has accepted for years, with no sign of stopping.

What to check in the coming matches

For those who follow players, a few things matter more than the score sheet. Her reception position in each rotation will tell you whether the passing line is arranged so she can shield a weaker teammate, and if it is, the system is using her as an anchor rather than a spearhead. How often she is the last voice before a block is the true measure of captaincy; an armband measures nothing. And how she handles third balls, when the combination has already broken down, is the moment no system protects you; real skill only shows there.

Every team has a fingerprint. It took me a few hundred matches to read it. For Gabi, that fingerprint was written once more in Istanbul, through things that never make the highlights: a first training session, one sentence from a coach, and a young woman deciding to trust a role she could never have pictured herself in. When a player dares to take on a role she does not see herself in, the only thing left to argue about is how long it will take before people admit she has changed.