In the last half century, the number of women who play football in Spain has grown so much that someone might think of the famous phrase that Alfonso Guerra uttered when the PSOE won its first general elections in 1982: “Spain is not Not even the mother who gave birth to her will recognize her.” The girls who kicked the ball then suffered marginalization from institutions and contempt from society, but in these 50 years they have corrected the situation until, for the first time, this sport has become the second most practiced by women in the country (107,853 federation tokens this season), only behind basketball (138,267), although still very far from men’s soccer (1,140,658), according to the Sports Statistics Yearbook 2024 of the Ministry of Education and Sports.
There is an anecdote told by Yolanda Sierra, one of the captains of the Atlético de Madrid reserve team, that exemplifies the exponential growth that football has experienced and how it has gone from being seen as a sport exclusively for men to a sphere also conquered by men. the woman. “I didn’t have a role model at my school when I started kicking the ball, I was the only one who played, but my school now already has a team of junior girls, and next year it will have two junior teams. If this already happens in schools, imagine it in the top teams. What’s happening now is outrageous, there are a lot of good girls,” says Sierra, 19 years old and an international in the youth ranks of the Spanish team.
She – she made her debut in the First Division with Atlético at the age of 16 – has been in all the categories of the club, which already has 16 teams and 306 footballers in its academy. Society has gone from rejecting that women kick the ball to understanding that they also like football, understand it and play it. Now there are references like Aitana Bonmatí, a midfielder with exquisite technique who has won all possible individual titles, but just a few decades ago there were still players who had to hide their passion in their own home. “I had a classmate who didn’t bring her sports clothes home. Another of the girls washed it and then gave it to her clean because her father, who was in the military, didn’t want her to play soccer. It was typical of the machismo of that time,” recalls Mari Mar Prieto, a former international soccer player with Spain who developed his career from the eighties to the beginning of the 2000s. Beli Fuentes, who played in the seventies with the Spanish team that The Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) refused to acknowledge, remembering similar situations: “It happened to many that they did not have family support. Parents who clashed with their siblings, or siblings with their parents because some wanted them to play and others didn’t. “There has been a lot of suffering.”
The struggle of the pioneers was fundamental for this sport to gradually make its way in Spain and overthrow prejudices. In 1980, now in democracy, the federation finally welcomed football played by women into its fold, but they continued for years combining work with the ball, often at the expense of their money and their vacation days. It wasn’t until much later that licenses skyrocketed. In 2016, a year after Spain played its first World Cup, soccer was still the fifth sport (44,123 chips) in the country in the women’s field. Twelve months later it surpassed volleyball, last year it surpassed golf and this season it has surpassed mountains and climbing for the first time. It has gone from 25,068 licenses in 2007 to 107,853 this year, a growth of 330% in 16 years. Manuela Romero, the president of the Sporting Club de Huelva, an independent club – without a male parent entity – that this year has been relegated to the second category of Spanish football after 18 consecutive years in the elite, summarizes the situation simply: “A few years We cannot cope with this part. “We have a lot of requests from girls.”
Romero has experienced the growth of football firsthand. First she was a player, then she went through the functions of delegate and secretary and in 2013 she became president of the club. “You notice the change in social perception in everything: in respect, in the fact that when people take a girl to train they no longer cause problems. Before, either the father or the mother did not want it, but now the entire family unit supports it. Years ago they underestimated us when we asked for a field to train. We were after the prebenjamines even though we played in First Division, but that has changed. They treat us differently, they understand our sporting needs, there is more respect, although there will always be haters”, he reflects.
In recent years, formidable steps have been taken that have promoted the rise of football played by women. Barcelona has become the best team in Europe, Spain won its first World Cup last summer, the F League has been professional since the 2022/2023 season – the teams exploit the competition and manage the income -, more and more clubs create sections women’s games – Celta was the last and a giant like Real Madrid did it in 2020 – and all the games are televised, so girls can watch their favorite players from home. “Since I joined Atleti, I always had references because I followed all the first team players. My parents not only supported me in training and games, but they took me to Cerro del Espino to see the first team. Since I was little I remember players like Amanda Sampedro, Esther González or Mapi León,” remembers Yolanda Sierra.
The boom for Barça and La Roja was experienced by Romero in the first home game of this season. A month after Spain won the World Cup, Sporting de Huelva faced the Catalans at the Nuevo Colombino—the stadium of Recreativo, the city’s big men’s club. “Attendance at the field was overflowing, we did not expect that amount of people. The visibility, that all the matches are televised, and the successes of the national team and Barcelona make the girls want to see the players,” says Romero, who also remembers another relevant milestone in the growth of football in his province: the Copa of the Queen conquered by the club in 2015. “It was a plus for the city, for the girls. The quarry has grown tremendously since that year,” she adds.
The increase in licenses and the conditions under which players train have caused some girls’ teams to beat boys’ teams before the physical change that adolescence entails. “When we played against the boys, we beat some of them quite a lot because we were a very good team, we heard comments from some parents about ‘how girls can beat you’, but beyond that, I have always received positive words,” says Sierra. Respect has grown, girls no longer have to endure the discrimination and insults of decades ago because society has finally understood that they enjoy football, but some professionals in the sector, like Manuela Romero, still give talks in schools to insist on equal education: “We explain that it is good for girls to compete against boys as children, and that if they win, it is the same as if boys had beaten them. We train athletes, but also people.”
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