The Year of Spain, and of Spanish dominance in women’s football, continued on Saturday on the same stage as last June: the final of the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
Barcelona defeated Lyon, the former queen of the competition, 2-0 to claim a second consecutive European title.
And with six Spanish players in their starting XI, plus even more off the bench, they proved a point that new U.S. women’s national team coach Emma Hayes made earlier this week.
“Spain,” Hayes told ESPN, “is so far ahead of everyone else.”
Three of Spain’s many stars showed in the 63rd minute why a fascinating match turned into a battle between technicians and athletes, of structure and beautiful passing versus power and set pieces.
Patri Guijarro, Mariona Caldentey and Aitana Bonmatí, three of the technicians, formed one of their vintage triangles in midfield. Bonmatí then shot forward. Caldentey fired a smart ball into her path. Bonmatí hurried into the box. Her cross took a poor deflection past Lyon keeper Christiane Endler, and Barcelona took a deserved lead.
Then, in stoppage time, after a few scares, three more Spanish stars thrilled around 50,000 fans.
This time it was Ona Batlle, Claudia Pina and Alexia Putellas, all substitutes in the second half. Pina, 22, who was that? not Part of Spain’s 2023 World Cup-winning squad ran through the left half into the penalty area. Putellas brought the dagger home with her wand from her left foot.
The Estadio de San Mamés, vol Blaugrana faithfulness, erupted – and not just because a repetition and a quadruple were complete; because this, a goal from Putella, was a fitting conclusion.
Putellas, 30, rose to prominence when Spanish women’s football was still in the shadows. Even as she won the Ballon d’Ors in 2021 and 2022, years of insufficient support and institutional neglect still held the women’s national team back.
By then, Spanish clubs – especially Barcelona – were producing an endless stream of talent. At various youth tournaments and at every level within the sport, coaches and development experts could see Spain rising.
The missing piece was a major international trophy. On the eve of Euro 2022, Putellas tore her cruciate ligament and Spain crashed out in the quarter-finals. At the World Cup, before 2023, LaRoja still had not achieved a knockout round victory.
On the club side, meanwhile, Barcelona won the first Women’s Champions League in 2021 – beating Hayes’ Chelsea 4-0 – but fell to Lyon, Europe’s dominant team, for the third time in five seasons in 2022.
So a year ago there were still reasonable questions about the validity of Spain’s player pipeline and the success of its youth. But last June, irrefutable evidence arrived. Barcelona came from behind to beat Wolfsburg in the 2023 Champions League final. Two and a half months later, despite a year of tumult, the Spanish national team won a first World Cup.
And for those who saw the rise up close, it was clear that there was more of the same to come.
“This,” Maria Teixidor, former head of women’s football at Barcelona, told Yahoo Sports last August, “is just the beginning.”
So Saturday’s triumph was a continuation. The next step could be a different one for many of Barca’s victors: the Olympics. They are the favorites for the gold medal, and no new USWNT coach can change that.
Their superiority is something Hayes knows all too well. Barcelona knocked its Chelsea teams out of the Champions League in 2021, 2023 and 2024.
As she left her final Chelsea press conference last weekend, Hayes turned and made an optimistic joke about seeing reporters again at the Olympic gold medal match later this summer. Then she added: “I have to beat the Spanish at some point.”
