Just a little greater than an hour earlier than the sport 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 on the merchandise stalls, anxious to purchase a jersey, a shawl, a commemorative trinket.
The busiest and longest line, although, varieties outdoors a sales space providing followers the prospect to have a photograph taken with their heroes. Inside a few minutes, it snakes all the way in which again to the doorway, populated by doting dad and mom and spellbound preteens hoping they arrived in time.
They’ve come to see probably the most dominant ladies’s soccer group on the planet. Barcelona Femení has been Spanish champion yearly since 2019. It has not misplaced a league recreation since final Could, a run throughout which eight of its gamers additionally lifted the Girls’s World Cup. On Saturday, the group can win its third Girls’s Champions League title, which crowns one of the best skilled group in Europe, in 4 seasons.
That success has turned the group’s standouts into world stars and the membership into what usually 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 the town’s streets, jerseys bearing the identify of Alexia Putellas or Aitana Bonmatí, Barça Femení’s greatest stars, are simply as frequent as these with the names of an icon of the lads’s group. And on the area’s soccer fields, a growth is enjoying out, with what was as soon as a male-dominated area now awash in ladies and ladies.
The variety of registered feminine soccer gamers in Catalonia has doubled previously six years, and it’s anticipated to develop exponentially within 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 a substitute, 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 stated, she by no means performed soccer towards one other lady. She had, in her youthful days, when she was representing neighborhood groups. However 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 abilities who would develop as much as play in Spain’s high 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 enjoying 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 instructed me that there have been dad and mom asking if she knew there have been ladies’ groups in some villages,” Torrejón stated. “My mom would say, ‘That’s nice, however she’s right here.’”
And never typical as a result of Torrejón was not solely brave sufficient to resist it, but in addition gifted sufficient to make it. She solely rejoined a ladies’ group on the age of 14, when Spanish legislation required her to take action. A couple of months later, she was in Espanyol’s first group. She gained a Spanish title there, after which added one other six with Barcelona Femení.
Now, although, her expertise feels anachronistic. Regardless of 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, certainly one of 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 group 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 %.
For the membership, the success of the ladies’s group has been greater than an financial stimulus: At a time when corruption allegations, monetary mismanagement and flagging performances have swirled across the males’s group, executives privately admit that the ladies’s facet has proved a welcome tonic for the membership’s vanity.
Way more important, although, are the alternatives it has created. 20 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 the town’s fringes the place Bonmatí began her profession, had a single ladies’ group, and it had solely 9 gamers. Now there are 10 ladies’ squads, in addition to a senior ladies’s facet.
“We now have a number of ladies becoming a member of as a result of it’s the group the place Aitana performed,” Tino Herrera, the membership’s president, stated.
That development has been mirrored elsewhere, forcing the physique that oversees soccer in Catalonia — the Catalan Soccer Federation — to modernize, and shortly, to verify the entire ladies who need to play have a spot to take action.
To Torrejón, together with her recollections of being instructed 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 folks and a change that wasn’t there earlier than,” she stated. “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 of the Time
Laura Cuenca tried all the pieces. She took her daughter dancing. Tried ice-skating. Provided cross-country working. However Sonia was adamant: She needed to play soccer.
Her hesitation was purely logistical. She knew soccer would imply a demanding schedule of coaching through the week, and weekends eaten up by video games. “You’ll be able to’t ever go away to the seaside, for instance,” 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 evening on the Sabadell Sports activities Middle, watching as Sonia takes the sphere. There shall be one other recreation tomorrow, an hour or so away in Barcelona. Subsequent week will convey three extra coaching classes.
It’s a lot for Ms. Cuenca, however much more for her daughter. “She’s 16, so there may be schoolwork, clearly,” her mom stated. “Then there are her pals, her job, her love life. It’s so much for her to steadiness.”
Like in all places else, Sabadell has seen a surge of ladies eager to play: 206 gamers this yr, up from the 84 who registered in 2020, based on Bruno Batlle, president of the middle.
Logistically, that could be a problem — there are solely 4 fields, and lots of extra groups demanding to make use of them — and it results in sure iniquities that, for fogeys like Ms. Cuenca, are a reminder that soccer stays a tougher 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. “Typically they don’t end till 11 p.m.,” Ms. Cuenca stated. “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 ladies all need to pay their very own means. The revolution, Ms. Cuenca famous, is just not but full.
The truth that there are battles nonetheless to be fought, although, doesn’t imply that the warfare is just not being gained. Ms. Cuenca is just not certain 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 “concept that soccer is just not for women.”
She has little doubt, although, that her daughter has been impressed by seeing what is feasible, enjoying out simply an hour down the highway.
