Maria Bardají was barely six years old, but it was clear to her, she wanted to play soccer. When she first jumped on the grass she learned how to do it from boys: she was the only one in the class who liked her and her parents couldn’t find any single-coed team for girls her age. It was the year 2015 and the women’s game in Spain was beginning to take off: Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmatí had not yet opened the front page of a newspaper and Barça had six years left to win their first Champions League. “What if it would have changed something to have had these referents?” She repeats before addressing the answer. “Of course I do, I wish I had them. Surely I would not have had to go through a mixed team ”, fantasizes the Barcelonan.
When Maria was born, in 2009, soccer brought together 25,000 federated girls and women throughout Spain. When she started playing, in 2015, there were already more than 40,000. Since then the number of players has doubled: there are already more than 87,000 girls, girls and women who are federated in a soccer team. Among them Maria, who since 2019 has been a defender in the CE Europe first team. “In the mixed school, she was the one different from her team, here she is one more and she shares hobbies and affinities with the rest of the teammates,” says her father, Òscar Bardají. Her dream, since she put on the scapula shirt for the first time, is to be able to win the league with her team. “Things change very quickly now”, wields the player.
In that things move faster now than before, you’re right. It has taken more than a century of history for the first division teams to start betting on the women’s game. But since they have done so, the effect has been overwhelming: attendance records have been broken in first division matches, teams in Spain have placed themselves among the world elite and a Barça player has won the Ballon d’Or for two times. “Thanks to examples like Bonmatí and Putellas, we too are advancing.” Perhaps the best example of this success is translated precisely in Maria’s hope of being able to dedicate herself professionally to soccer.
In any case, as promising as the future that awaits women’s soccer is, it is still an abyss separating it from men’s. The minimum salary set by the collective agreement of the Football Federation Association (AFE) and LaLiga is eleven times higher for men than for women. While the minimum for men is 182,000 euros, for women it is 16,000, a figure only 880 euros higher than the interprofessional minimum wage. The data is even more eloquent if the average earnings are compared: theirs, located around 40,000 euros per year, are 58 times less than the 2.3 million that they earn on average.
If Spain wins the World Cup, which starts next Thursday, July 20 in Australia, it will be rewarded with 3.9 million euros. The prize for winning the men’s World Cup held last year in Qatar was almost 10 times higher, at 34 million euros. The disparity in terms of television rights, sponsorships and income from image marketing remains considerable. Of the FIFA clubs, only 7% generate more than a million dollars in revenue between matchdays, television broadcasts and prizes.
The problem with women’s football is not the comparative injury compared to the astronomical figures for men’s, but rather the fact that outside of the elite clubs the salaries are so low that the athletes do not have the necessary resources to concentrate exclusively on their sports career. For Maria, men’s football has a lot to learn from women’s: “It’s a much more beautiful game, there is less body and you step on the ball a lot more.” And she adds: “What has to be matched is not the game and not even the salaries, but the visibility.”
As this moment arrives, Maria tries to be the example that she did not have for her little cousin Clàudia. For a few years, when she has time, she has taken her to play soccer in Joaquim Folguera square, in the Putxet neighborhood of Barcelona. This year Clàudia has signed up for soccer. Both will follow the World Cup closely.
