Sportivo Ameliano says photographer dress code lacked approval

Daniel Okafor

On Thursday, Sportivo Ameliano president Héctor Melgarejo said the club had not authorized a stadium dress code for photographers and reporters, reversing course after female sports photographer Adriana Caballero said the rules targeted women. He promised an official statement, though none had yet been published.

What exactly did the club’s new guidelines require?

Sportivo Ameliano is a professional soccer team from Paraguay that plays in the nation’s top division, the Paraguayan Primera División. It asked members of the press to avoid revealing outfits “in order to maintain… the club’s institutional image.” The detailed rules went further than a general request:

• The guidelines barred female and male photographers from wearing “low-cut blouses” or outfits that exposed the navel.
• Women could wear leggings only in black or dark blue.

Available reporting does not identify the press official who issued the guidelines, date their circulation, specify penalties, or make clear whether every restriction covered reporters as well as photographers. Those omissions leave two separate issues: whether the club authorized the code, and whether its unequal rules for women were discriminatory.

Why did Caballero say she had been singled out?

Caballero, 29, is a professional sports photographer who regularly covers Paraguayan Primera División games and has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram. She believes Sportivo Ameliano introduced the code after images of her photographing a soccer game circulated widely. No club evidence in the available account tests that claim.

She also said the ban left her uncomfortable and surprised, and that she always wears what she finds comfortable for work:

“I always want to wear the most comfortable clothes possible for my job. Sooner or later it probably had to come to this,” Caballero said, according to reports.

What did she fear for other women?

In a further radio interview, Caballero said reading the club statement came as a shock because she immediately considered how it might harm colleagues. Her point was not merely personal comfort. Restrictions on leggings and exposed midriffs could make it harder for other female photographers and journalists to work, she argued.

Her comments prompted fierce criticism of Sportivo Ameliano on social media and wider discussion about discrimination against women in Paraguayan sports journalism. Yet criticism of unequal rules does not, by itself, prove that the club deliberately designed them to exclude women. That intent remains a question the promised statement has not yet answered.

What did Melgarejo concede?

In an interview with Fútbol a lo Grande on Thursday, Melgarejo said the rules came from the person in charge of the press without authorization:

“I deeply regret that this has happened. It did not leave the club, it was not institutional, but it was something that came out of the person in charge of the press without any authorization from the club.”

He said Sportivo Ameliano would issue an institutional statement clarifying that the code did not represent the club. The press official had acted on his own initiative, Melgarejo said, but he still did not know why. The statement and an explanation from that official were both pending.

Does the reversal settle the dispute?

Not fully. Melgarejo’s concession answers the authorization question, but his promised statement does not yet constitute a published policy revision. The club has not said in the available account that it will withdraw specific clothing rules, discipline the official, set a dress standard for all photographers, or explain whether the code applied only at the stadium. No broader fan dress policy is described.

For working photographers, the rules treated clothing as part of the club’s institutional image, closer to a uniform requirement than a personal-style dispute. Yet the photographic issue matters too: Caballero says photographs of her at work helped trigger scrutiny of her appearance. That links image-making to institutional control over the people making the images.

Still, the available account does not indicate that the official had authority to enforce a clothing code or that any photographer faced consequences for ignoring it. Nor does it document a formal complaint by another woman. Those limits matter because the club’s retrospective denial of institutional backing does not explain how such rules entered the press workflow in the first place.

What happens next?

The next test is whether the promised institutional statement names the authorization failure, clarifies that the rules are not club policy and produces the explanation Melgarejo says he is awaiting. Sportivo Ameliano can end the immediate dispute by making that record public. Without one, the issue remains a collision between the club’s control of its image and the working conditions of women who cover the game.