In January, Barcelona Femeni trounced Atletico Madrid 7-0 in the Super Cup, rounding off 2021
when they won every title possible — the Champions League, the league and the Copa de la Reina.
It took their tally up to a record seven league titles and eight Copa de la Reina trophies.
They have already been crowned 2022 league champions, clinching the title with six
matches to spare after scoring 146 goals, conceding just 8 and winning all their games.
They are the closest it gets to footballing perfection, but how did they get there?
21 years ago, things were different. The freshly-branded Spanish Superliga didn’t even
accept Barcelona as members because of their poor results in the 2000-01 season, and the women’s
team were only incorporated into FC Barcelona as their own official sector a year later.
After three years in the top-flight from 2004 to 2007,
they were relegated, and there were concerns about the future of the women’s
side. They returned at the first time of asking in 2008 though, and won their first
league title in 2012 to qualify for the Champions League the following season.
The club went professional in the summer of 2015 — a turning point
according to sporting director Markel Zubizarreta, who joined that year.
“There was a mindset change seven years ago,” says Zubizarreta.
“The club was not building a women’s football project but a professional football project
in women’s football. To invest in the same way, to build the same project.
And from 2015 to 2022, Barcelona have transformed the structure of their women’s teams. The number
of first-team staff has grown to include roles such as an additional assistant manager,
a goalkeeping coach, an analyst, a team delegate,
a kit manager, doctors, psychologists and nutritionists. The academy was also
revamped to allocate two coaches per youth team from the under-10s up to the B team,
as well as physios, doctors, psychologists, physical trainers and methodologists.
The women’s section also has a dedicated regional and international scouting department
as well as a sports science team. The football management, scouting, playing methodology,
sports science and academy departments replicate the men’s model, with the same facilities.
So, organisation has been important, so too a traditional Barcelona strength: homegrown players.
In March, when Barca beat Real Madrid in front of 91,553 fans at the Camp Nou,
their squad featured 10 players who had come through the Barcelona academy system,
and eight of the starting XI had joined the first team since 2017.
For the last four years, Barcelona’s under-10, under-12 and under-14 girls’ teams have played
in boys’ leagues. They’re the only club in Spain to do this. But the focus is not just on winning,
but on understanding the Barcelona style and training at a high level — three to
four sessions per week, increasing to five or six as players get older.
But that does not mean that winning is not a part of the academy. The girls’ team has won
the boys’ league and their under-14s side is on course to top the table again this season.
“The academy players have a lot of talent — maybe more talent than the first-team players,
because they have played in a professional academy since they were 11,” explains Zubizarreta.
Next season, in 2022-23, to grow that talent pool,
the club aim to expand the number of girls’ academy teams from five to seven.
“It’s not that we are doing badly, it’s because the level of the first team is
so high that we need to do things even better in the academy,” says Zubizarreta.
“We are really proud of this. It’s different and we need to keep this difference because
everyone is investing in women’s football. If we stop, the clubs behind us may reach our level.”
Barcelona’s commitment to maintaining that advantage was shown when,
for the first time since its founding in 1979, La Masia welcomed female residents last August.
The nine academy teenagers who play for the Barcelona B team, eight from the surrounding
Catalonia region and one from the nearby island of Mallorca, combine their training with their
studies. They are the only female athletes living on-site, with their bedroom view
looking across to the Johan Cruyff Stadium, the regular home of the women’s first team.
The building houses 106 athletes from Barcelona’s football, basketball, handball, futsal and roller
hockey teams. They are educated in classrooms on the ground floor — the auditorium hosts seminars
on what the club calls “invisible training”, broaching topics from diet to social media.
There is a deep-rooted, relentless desire to improve among the women’s
team and that stems from the challenges they have faced. From 2015 to 2019, for instance,
Barcelona could only finish as runners-up in the league. In 2019, Barcelona reached their
first Champions League final but suffered a chastening 4-1 defeat against Lyon.
The team realised they had to improve their fitness and physical strength and Zubizarreta
is happy with the progress they’ve made in the past three years.
But Barcelona Femeni are not an industrial team. Characterised by short passes and movement,
the methodology and style is the same as with the men’s team.
In fact, some of the men’s coaches have joined the women’s side.
“The game is the same”, says Zubizaretta. “If there’s a Barca fan that puts on the TV and they
cannot recognise if they’re women or men, they’ll say, ‘That’s a Barca team’. That is important.”
And this is also a team to be proud of. Barcelona don’t just win and don’t just
beat opponents with big, convincing scorelines, they also win in style,
and the quality of their football has caught the eye of male players past and present.
Academy boys who, previously, would bypass the women training without batting an eyelid, now wait
20 minutes for a photo with them. Barcelona legend Carles Puyol has been a huge advocate
for the women’s team, posting support from his Instagram account, with its 11 million followers.
And there was no greater testament to the team’s standing and surging popularity than that historic
5-2 win in Camp Nou in April, when supporters from as far as Mexico and South Korea flooded through
the stadium gates, waving flags and flares, chanting as the Barcelona team bus arrived.
Tickets started at €9 (£7.60) and around 30,000 of Barcelona’s socios signed up during the first
24-hour window of exclusive access. They were able to purchase up to four tickets and Camp
Nou was sold out within three days, setting a new world-record attendance for a women’s game.
A month later, Barcelona actually broke their own record.
When they thumped Wolfsburg 5-1 in the first leg of their Champions League semi-final,
a result decorated with intricate football and capped by a penalty won and scored by
the Ballon d’Or-winning Alexia Putellas, it was in front of a staggering 91,648 fans.
What happened today and a month ago has left us speechless, said midfielder Patricia Guijarro
in the aftermath. “As the days, or the years go by, we will understand better what has happened.
Right now we have not completely grasped the magnitude of this experience.”
No, Barcelona Femeni may not quite understand the movement around them,
but the world seems to understand exactly how good they are.