Barça’s men’s section has managed to emerge this year among the eight best teams in Europe, but it remains to be seen how far it will go for a club that is lagging behind in the League and that, aware of its shortcomings, looks at its rivals with awe. of Champions. Only the very young players that Xavi Hernández has opted for – with courage and determination – generate enthusiasm in a club weighed down by an abysmal debt and a management that, being benevolent, we would describe as grotesque.
The diagnosis is very different if the focus is placed on the women’s team, considered a true world team, virtual League champion (today they are playing the classic against a Real Madrid that has arrived late and poorly in women’s football) and one of the favorites to win the Champions League. The team led by Jonatan Giraldez, in addition – and this is the most relevant thing – has generated around it an exciting dynamic of identification not only with the club, but also with the demand for a more egalitarian society and a less stale football.
All of this has been confirmed the few times that the team of Alexia Putellas and Aitana Bonmatí has ??been able to play at the Camp Nou or the Estadi Olímpic, with record attendances that have astonished the world and stands full of girls and boys. In the beautiful but tiny Johan Cruyff you can see that special atmosphere in every game.
In short, Joan Laporta’s board inherited a team that would be the dream of any president: a super squad admired around the world, while Florentino Pérez’s Madrid pays dearly for the lack of ability of its managers to detect the global impact it already had. women’s football in the previous decade. The Golden Balls won by Alexia and Aitana have confirmed the stellar projection of this Barça in a sport that is promoting an authentic social revolution.
But, despite all this, the feeling is spreading that the club is lowering the ambition of its commitment to women’s football. It’s hard to believe, but the facts confirm it. Barça let the architect of the squad, Markel Zubizarreta (now in the national team) escape without a replacement at his level and will also lose, with a resignation that scares, Jonatan Giráldez, without his name being known to this day. substitute or substitute.
Not even the continuity of a symbol like Alexia is certain, who is being denied a contract improvement that, even if accepted, would continue to place her below the lowest paid male player, and that despite the fact that she sells more shirts with his name than any footballer, with the exception, it seems, of Lewandoski, Pedri and Gavi.
Nor do messages launched by the board – the same one that invited Messi to leave – invite optimism in the sense that it will not be possible to compete with the English clubs that do invest heavily in their women’s teams, either thanks to the income that these they generate by themselves or by leveling budgets with male templates (in short, moving towards equality in the same sense as the rest of society does). Could it be that this Barça is not so different from the Madrid that had to hastily buy a first-class club to stop making a fool of itself? In any case, there is still time to correct course.
The problem transcends sports: Barça’s award-winning soccer players have become renewed symbols of a city that does not have enough of them. When reviewing history, it is clear that, since the industrial revolution, football has helped foster a sense of belonging to a community (sometimes, yes, to undesirable extremes).
Well, the passion that the Blaugrana awaken is an updated example of this. It is not easy to find references like this in a metropolis from which young people feel expelled by their unsustainable rents. This is no longer the exciting city that in 1992 appeared on the world driven by one hundred thousand Olympic volunteers, but rather a city that, like almost all of them, tends toward disenchantment.
If Barça loses this match, Barcelona too.