EGN NEWS DESK
Somewhat greater than an hour earlier than the sport begins, the gates exterior the Johan Cruyff Stadium swing open and a thousand or so followers rush inside. Some scurry to the turnstiles. Others wait patiently on the merchandise stalls, anxious to purchase a jersey, a shawl, a commemorative trinket.
The busiest and longest line, although, varieties exterior a sales space providing followers the possibility to have a photograph taken with their heroes. Within a few minutes, it snakes all the way in which again to the doorway, populated by doting mother and father and spellbound preteens hoping they arrived in time.
They have come to see probably the most dominant ladies’s soccer workforce on the planet. Barcelona Femení has been Spanish champion yearly since 2019. It has not misplaced a league recreation since final May, a run throughout which eight of its gamers additionally lifted the Women’s World Cup. On Saturday, the workforce can win its third Women’s Champions League title, which crowns the perfect skilled workforce in Europe, in 4 seasons.
That success has turned the workforce’s standouts into international stars and the membership into what typically looks as if a juggernaut. It has additionally remodeled Barcelona, and the broader area of Catalonia, into the worldwide heartbeat of girls’s soccer, a case examine in what occurs when the ladies’s recreation wins the identical prominence as the lads’s.
On town’s streets, jerseys bearing the identify of Alexia Putellas or Aitana Bonmatí, Barça Femení’s largest stars, are simply as widespread as these with the names of an icon of the lads’s workforce. And on the area’s soccer fields, a increase is taking part in out, with what was as soon as a male-dominated house now awash in ladies and ladies.
The variety of registered feminine soccer gamers in Catalonia has doubled prior to now six years, and it’s anticipated to develop exponentially within the decade to return. There are extra coaches, extra golf equipment, extra groups, extra video games, extra leagues.
The younger followers queuing for a photograph weren’t hoping for an image with a distant hero. They have been hoping, as an alternative, to be shut sufficient to the touch the ladies who’ve helped make all of that actual.
Boomtown
From the age of 11 till she was 14, Marta Torrejón mentioned, she by no means performed soccer in opposition to one other lady. She had, in her youthful days, when she was representing neighborhood groups. But from the second she joined Espanyol — the smaller of the 2 skilled soccer golf equipment in Barcelona — her teammates, and her opponents, have been all boys.
At instances, being the one lady amongst skills who would develop as much as play in Spain’s prime league made her really feel “misplaced,” she admitted, however for probably the most half she was simply grateful.
Torrejón’s first steps in soccer have been each typical and never. Typical as a result of she began taking part in within the late Nineteen Nineties, when alternatives for women to take action — in Barcelona, in Spain, in Europe — have been scant and when those that joined boys sides weren’t at all times welcomed.
“My mom has advised me that there have been mother and father asking if she knew there have been ladies’ groups in some villages,” Torrejón mentioned. “My mom would say, ‘That’s nice, however she’s right here.’”
And not typical as a result of Torrejón was not solely brave sufficient to resist it, but additionally gifted sufficient to make it. She solely rejoined a ladies’ workforce on the age of 14, when Spanish regulation required her to take action. A couple of months later, she was in Espanyol’s first workforce. She received a Spanish title there, after which added one other six with Barcelona Femení.
Now, although, her expertise feels anachronistic. Despite Spain’s World Cup win final yr being clouded by the sight of Luis Rubiales, president of the nation’s soccer federation on the time, forcibly kissing Jennifer Hermoso, one in all its most celebrated gamers, on the podium — an incident that in the end led a cost of sexual assault — the exponential development of girls’s soccer in Barcelona is unchecked.
Over the previous three years, Barcelona’s ladies’s workforce has tripled the cash it brings in by sponsorships, merchandise and ticketing. It now earns $8.5 million a season from its sponsors alone. Its stadium is packed. In 2023, the yr that introduced the World Cup title for Spain, the membership’s on-line gross sales of girls’s attire elevated roughly 275 p.c.
For the membership, the success of the ladies’s workforce has been greater than an financial stimulus: At a time when corruption allegations, monetary mismanagement and flagging performances have swirled across the males’s workforce, executives privately admit that the ladies’s aspect has proved a welcome tonic for the membership’s shallowness.
Far extra vital, although, are the alternatives it has created. Two many years since Torrejón blazed a lonely path, ladies hopeful of following in her footsteps have an abundance of selection.
One illustrative instance: In 2019, Sant Pere de Ribes, a membership on town’s fringes the place Bonmatí began her profession, had a single ladies’ workforce, and it had solely 9 gamers. Now there are 10 ladies’ squads, in addition to a senior ladies’s aspect.
“We have a variety of ladies becoming a member of as a result of it’s the workforce the place Aitana performed,” Tino Herrera, the membership’s president, mentioned.
That development has been mirrored elsewhere, forcing the physique that oversees soccer in Catalonia — the Catalan Football Federation — to modernize, and rapidly, to ensure all the ladies who need to play have a spot to take action.
To Torrejón, together with her reminiscences of being advised soccer was not a spot for women, that could be a supply of immense “pleasure and satisfaction.”
“What you do creates an affect on different individuals and a change that wasn’t there earlier than,” she mentioned. “The ladies coming now have these references that we didn’t have. They see one thing in the way forward for this career.”
All Soccer, All the Time
Laura Cuenca tried all the things. She took her daughter dancing. Tried ice-skating. Offered cross-country working. But Sonia was adamant: She needed to play soccer.
Her hesitation was purely logistical. She knew soccer would imply a demanding schedule of coaching throughout the week, and weekends eaten up by video games. “You can’t ever go away to the seashore, for instance,” Ms. Cuenca mentioned, just a bit ruefully.
Sonia was insistent, although. She loves soccer, and her mom loves her, so give up was inevitable, actually. And so now, Ms. Cuenca finds herself spending one other Saturday evening on the Sabadell Sports Center, watching as Sonia takes the sphere. There will likely be one other recreation tomorrow, an hour or so away in Barcelona. Next week will convey three extra coaching classes.
It is lots for Ms. Cuenca, however much more for her daughter. “She’s 16, so there may be schoolwork, clearly,” her mom mentioned. “Then there are her associates, her job, her love life. It’s lots for her to steadiness.”
Like all over the place else, Sabadell has seen a surge of women desirous to play: 206 gamers this yr, up from the 84 who registered in 2020, in keeping with Bruno Batlle, president of the middle.
Logistically, that could be a problem — there are solely 4 fields, and plenty of extra groups demanding to make use of them — and it results in sure iniquities that, for folks like Ms. Cuenca, are a reminder that soccer stays a more difficult place for women than for boys.
At Sabadell, for instance, it’s the ladies’ groups that always should make do with the worst coaching slots. “Sometimes they don’t end till 11 p.m.,” Ms. Cuenca mentioned. “So Sonia doesn’t get to mattress till very late, which suggests she’s drained for college.”
And whereas gifted gamers on the boys’ groups might need their registration charges or journey prices backed, the women all must pay their very own method. The revolution, Ms. Cuenca famous, will not be but full.
The proven fact that there are battles nonetheless to be fought, although, doesn’t imply that the struggle will not be being received. Ms. Cuenca will not be positive what proportion of that may be attributed to Barça Femení — there has, she mentioned, been a broader social change that has all however extinguished the “concept that soccer will not be for women.”
She has little question, although, that her daughter has been impressed by seeing what is feasible, taking part in out simply an hour down the highway.
