Slightly greater than an hour earlier than the recreation begins, the gates outdoors the Johan Cruyff Stadium swing open and a thousand or so followers rush inside. Some scurry to the turnstiles. Others wait patiently at the merchandise stalls, anxious to purchase a jersey, a shawl, a commemorative trinket.
The busiest and longest line, although, types outdoors a sales space providing followers the likelihood to have a photograph taken with their heroes. Within a few minutes, it snakes all the method again to the entrance, populated by doting dad and mom and spellbound preteens hoping they arrived in time.
They have come to see the most dominant girls’s soccer crew 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 crew can win its third Women’s Champions League title, which crowns the greatest skilled crew in Europe, in 4 seasons.
That success has turned the crew’s standouts into international stars and the membership into what usually looks as if a juggernaut. It has additionally reworked Barcelona, and the broader area of Catalonia, into the international heartbeat of ladies’s soccer, a case examine in what occurs when the girls’s recreation wins the identical prominence as the males’s.
On the metropolis’s streets, jerseys bearing the identify of Alexia Putellas or Aitana Bonmatí, Barça Femení’s largest stars, are simply as frequent as these with the names of an icon of the males’s crew. And on the area’s soccer fields, a increase is enjoying out, with what was as soon as a male-dominated area now awash in girls and ladies.
The variety of registered feminine soccer gamers in Catalonia has doubled in the previous six years, and it’s anticipated to develop exponentially in the decade to come back. 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 girls who’ve helped make all of that actual.
Boomtown
From the age of 11 till she was 14, Marta Torrejón stated, she by no means performed soccer towards 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 two skilled soccer golf equipment in Barcelona — her teammates, and her opponents, have been all boys.
At instances, being the solely lady amongst abilities who would develop as much as play in Spain’s prime league made her really feel “out of place,” she admitted, however for 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 enjoying in the late 1990s, when alternatives for ladies 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 mother has told me that there were parents asking if she knew there were girls’ teams in some villages,” Torrejón stated. “My mother would say, ‘That’s great, but she’s here.’”
And not typical as a result of Torrejón was not solely brave sufficient to face up to it, but additionally gifted sufficient to make it. She solely rejoined a ladies’ crew at the age of 14, when Spanish regulation required her to take action. A couple of months later, she was in Espanyol’s first crew. She gained 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 at the time, forcibly kissing Jennifer Hermoso, considered one of its most celebrated gamers, on the rostrum — an incident that finally led a cost of sexual assault — the exponential development of ladies’s soccer in Barcelona is unchecked.
Over the previous three years, Barcelona’s girls’s crew has tripled the cash it brings in by way of 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 ladies’s attire elevated roughly 275 p.c.
For the membership, the success of the girls’s crew has been greater than an financial stimulus: At a time when corruption allegations, monetary mismanagement and flagging performances have swirled round the males’s crew, executives privately admit that the girls’s aspect has proved a welcome tonic for the membership’s shallowness.
Far extra vital, although, are the alternatives it has created. Two a long time since Torrejón blazed a lonely path, ladies hopeful of following in her footsteps have an abundance of alternative.
One illustrative instance: In 2019, Sant Pere de Ribes, a membership on the metropolis’s fringes the place Bonmatí began her profession, had a single ladies’ crew, and it had solely 9 gamers. Now there are 10 ladies’ squads, in addition to a senior girls’s aspect.
“We have a lot of girls joining because it’s the team where Aitana played,” Tino Herrera, the membership’s president, stated.
That development has been mirrored elsewhere, forcing the physique that oversees soccer in Catalonia — the Catalan Football Federation — to modernize, and shortly, to ensure all of the ladies who need to play have a spot to take action.
To Torrejón, together with her recollections of being informed soccer was not a spot for ladies, that could be a supply of immense “pride and satisfaction.”
“What you do creates an impact on other people and a change that wasn’t there before,” she stated. “The girls coming now have those references that we didn’t have. They see something in the future of this profession.”
All Soccer, All the Time
Laura Cuenca tried every thing. 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 beach, for example,” Ms. Cuenca stated, 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 night time at the Sabadell Sports Center, watching as Sonia takes the subject. There will likely be one other recreation tomorrow, an hour or so away in Barcelona. Next week will convey three extra coaching periods.
It is loads for Ms. Cuenca, however much more for her daughter. “She’s 16, so there is schoolwork, obviously,” her mom stated. “Then there are her friends, her job, her love life. It’s a lot for her to balance.”
Like all over the place else, Sabadell has seen a surge of ladies eager to play: 206 gamers this yr, up from the 84 who registered in 2020, in accordance 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 ladies than for boys.
At Sabadell, for instance, it’s the ladies’ groups that always should make do with the worst coaching slots. “Sometimes they do not finish until 11 p.m.,” Ms. Cuenca stated. “So Sonia does not get to bed until very late, which means she’s tired for school.”
And whereas gifted gamers on the boys’ groups might need their registration charges or journey prices sponsored, the ladies all must pay their very own method. The revolution, Ms. Cuenca famous, will not be but full.
The incontrovertible fact that there are battles nonetheless to be fought, although, doesn’t imply that the struggle will not be being gained. Ms. Cuenca will not be positive what proportion of that may be attributed to Barça Femení — there has, she stated, been a broader social change that has all however extinguished the “idea that soccer is not for girls.”
She has little doubt, although, that her daughter has been impressed by seeing what is feasible, enjoying out simply an hour down the street.
