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“Where did this girl come from, where did she come from?”
Round Catalonia, these incredulous phrases have been heard each time Aitana Bonmati took to the pitch.
Within the early 2000s – an period when soccer pitches have been usually not seen as a spot for ladies – she defied stereotypes and scepticism from the start.
Oscar Gamez was her first coach, guiding her as a seven-year-old lady in a CD Ribes boys’ crew. He vividly recollects the post-match scenes, when mother and father from opposing groups would strategy him in disbelief.
“She was like a tsunami,” Gamez informed BBC Sport. “On the pitch, she was a force of nature. It was a sensation to see her play.
“She had an additional factor that the boys did not have – this effervescence, this character of at all times wanting and wanting and eager to go… that was the principle distinction.”
Bonmati was not just the only girl on her team; she was the only girl playing for CD Ribes as a whole. One club, with 400 boys and one girl.
“We all know how boys could be, and at the moment, they discriminated in opposition to her for being the one lady,” Gamez said. “However I by no means needed to mediate. Aitana had a really robust character and did not let anybody trample over her.”
Taking part in on tough pitches, Bonmati would throw herself into tackles, mud herself down and by no means complain.
Small-town scepticism quickly turned to awe.
Bonmati’s story isn’t merely one of a girl who played football; it is a saga of mental strength, intensity, and a relentless desire that transcends generations.
From the dirt and grit of Ribes’ proving grounds, Bonmati has risen to the pinnacle of women’s football, yet the source of her energy and resilience stretches back, far beyond the pitch and even her own birth.
Rosa Bonmati, Aitana’s mother, faced a form. And a decision.
It was 1998. She had come to the civil registry to register her daughter’s birth.
Spanish tradition, convention and legislation were unanimous. The surname of Rosa’s father – Vincent Conca – must be the first of Aitana’s two surnames. Bonmati would be retained as a name, but only on official documents. Aitana would be commonly known as Aitana Conca.
Rosa resisted.
With Vincent’s full endorsement, she put her own name – Bonmati – before her husband’s.
When the bureaucracy wouldn’t allow that, Rosa instead registered herself as a single mother, leaving Vincent’s details off the form entirely, and giving Aitana only one surname, but an early example of standing up for what she believes in.
Rosa left the registry but refused to let the issue lie. Together with politician Imma Mayol and a team of legal experts, she put forward a proposal to change the law to allow parents to ascribe their children’s’ surnames in any order.
It was passed at the end of 1999, a few months before Aitana’s second birthday. Vincent’s name was added to Aitana’s official documents, but after Rosa’s. She became Aitana Bonmati Conca, just as Rosa had always intended.
Vincent, like his wife, is committed to causes.
As well as advocating for family rights, he is a campaigner in the Movement for the Defence of the Land (MDT), a coalition of socialist organisations pushing for the independence of Catalonia and other surrounding regions.
“Rosa has at all times been a bit extra impulsive, whereas Vincent is a little more reflective and considerate and composed. The mix has given Aitana this manner of being”, her aunt Lily Bonmati informed BBC Sport.
Aitana’s upbringing was a peaceable one.
Nestled on the outskirts of Barcelona, Ribes is a tranquil village of about 30,000 residents.
In this idyllic spot, where the sound of children playing football echoes off the town square’s stone buildings, Bonmati thrived.
For her parents, intellectual stimulation was more important than athletic passion.
Both Rosa and Vincent taught Catalan language and literature and the family home resembled a quaint library, with every room adorned with books.
Guided by Rosa, Aitana would piece together puzzles as a toddler, building focus and concentration to go with her natural energy.
By then she had long since been in her own room. Her parents, keen to develop their daughter’s independence, had taught her to sleep alone from the tender age of three months.
The love of books is something that has been passed down through the generations, with Bonmati fascinated by philosophy, justice and history.
Her reading includes If This Is A Man and Man’s Search for Meaning – Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl’s accounts of their incarceration in Nazi-run concentration camps during the Second World War – and Heather Dune Macadam’s The Nine Hundred, which details the story of a group of young women who were the first Jews to be taken by official transport to Auschwitz.
Currently, she is engrossed in Open – Andre Agassi’s 2009 autobiography – which charts the legendary tennis player’s intense childhood and difficulties dealing with fame.
Bonmati had tried swimming and basketball, but it surely was soccer that match greatest, each for her and her household.
Her mother relished Bonmati’s disregard for gender norms, while her father would fashion a ball from aluminium foil and take on his young daughter in high-spirited games in the kitchen.
As her passion developed, Bonmati would wear her Ribes football kit to family gatherings rather than a dress. And in her family, such freedom of expression was encouraged rather than challenged.
Her first coach, Gamez, saw her fearless spirit and drew a comparison with charismatic Barcelona captain Carles Puyol. Starting as a defender, Bonmati’s ability to steal the ball and initiate attacks showcased her strength on the pitch.
But as Gamez rotated her from defence to midfield, Bonmati’s influence only grew, paving the way for her journey, 40 minutes east, from the serene village of Ribes to the noise and light of FC Barcelona.
The move to Barcelona marked a substantial step up in the standard of football. Yet, there was not the same improvement in conditions off the pitch.
After training, Bonmati and her Barcelona youth team-mates would make do with cold showers in makeshift changing rooms.
Gym sessions and tactical video analysis lectures, pivotal to developing their teenage minds and bodies for the professional game, never happened.
And, while their male counterparts had the famed La Masia, Barcelona’s female youth players had no similar on-site residential facility to help their training.
Instead, once their three-hour training sessions finished around midnight, Bonmati would watch her team-mates climb into family cars to head back to their distant hometowns, fighting off sleep to study schoolwork as they went.
And so they have been the fortunate ones.
Bonmati used to take public transport every day, first the bus and then the train, to be able to train with Barcelona. This was because her mother suffers from chronic pain condition fibromyalgia and was often unable to drive and her father had not passed his test.
It was a journey of 23 miles and more than an hour each way for Bonmati.
“I used to be working in order to not miss the practice dwelling… I even puzzled if it was price all the trouble,” she admitted last year, thinking back to those days.
“She bought drained as a result of it was robust,” her aunt Lily said. “She was about to stop soccer in adolescence.”
Aitana was 13 when her mother suggested that, as well as working hard towards her goals, she should also work on herself.
Bonmati started seeing a psychologist, focusing on accepting frustration as a normal part of achievement and the pursuit of excellence.
Some of the exercises that she learned, such as writing down her emotions to help ease their burden on her mind, she still practises today.
Through these testing years, though, Bonmati’s love of football never wavered. Former team-mate Carla Rivera vividly recalls Bonmati’s relentless pursuit of improvement.
“I recall her being extraordinarily demanding of herself, obsessive about sport and pushed to enhance,” Rivera informed BBC Sport.
“There have been occasions when she stayed in a single day at my place after late coaching classes, and after dinner she remained engrossed in football-related content material on the web.”
The obsession did not translate into instant success. When Lluis Cortes was appointed manager of Barcelona in 2019, the 21-year-old Bonmati was a fringe player.
“Aitana is a really formidable participant who at all times needs to play and be essential, and that function was proving to be difficult for her,” admitted Cortes of Bonmati’s bit-part presence in the team.
However, Cortes, who knew the midfielder from working with the Catalan ‘national’ team, was soon won over by her determination and quality.
“She’s a participant who offers her all in each coaching session, and thru that she has undoubtedly secured her place within the first crew,” he added.
Bonmati has since emerged as a key player in Barcelona’s midfield, winning four successive domestic titles and two Champions Leagues.
Bonmati’s importance for club and country increased after Alexia Putellas, her predecessor as the Ballon d’Or winner, suffered a knee ligament injury in 2022.
Bonmati seamlessly stepped into the breach, not only assuming a crucial role in Barcelona and the Spain national team, but also shouldering leadership responsibilities.
“I consider that Aitana did need to step up with Alexia’s harm,” said Cortes. “She was the participant who needed to assume that function as a result of we had been getting ready her in recent times to be a pacesetter throughout the crew.”
In August 2023, when Spain’s Ivana Andres hoisted the Women’s World Cup into the night sky in Sydney, Bonmati was on the edge of the celebration image that would appear on front pages around the world.
But, on the pitch and in the aftermath, she was central.
“She is a pacesetter, particularly on the sector, the place she demonstrates it essentially the most. She is taken into account the mind and nerve of the crew,” Ona Batlle, a team-mate for membership and nation, informed BBC Sport.
In the story of women’s football, Veronica Boquete, a revered figure and former Spain captain, stands as testament to the national team’s resilience against their own football association.
Eight years ago, Boquete skippered Spain in their first World Cup appearance. The outcome – a group-stage exit – was very different from 2023, but the backdrop was depressingly familiar.
Within the aftermath of the event, Boquete and the remainder of the squad demanded the removal of Ignacio Quereda, who had coached the team for 27 years, later accusing him of overseeing a toxic culture.
Quereda resigned in July 2015.
Boquete believes that collective uprising, aimed at reshaping the federation and national team structures, lay the groundwork for subsequent transformations off the pitch and success on it.
“After we began to expertise good circumstances overseas, we knew how essential it was to make this leap in high quality,” Boquete informed BBC Sport.
“It was the one factor lacking.”
Boquete says Spain’s women’s team are not seeking identical salaries to men but rather parity in training, travel and technical staff to optimise their competitiveness and maximise their chances of victory.
In August 2023, the ultimate moment of triumph arrived – a team who, a decade before had never even qualified for the Women’s World Cup, won the game’s greatest prize.
However Spain’s sweetest second was soured by the kiss that former Spanish Football Federation president Luis Rubiales gave forward Jennifer Hermoso as the team went to collect their prize in Sydney.
The image of that kiss, which Hermoso says was non-consensual, circled the globe and started a worldwide debate.
Bonmati was one of 15 players who wrote to the Spanish federation in September 2022 saying that they would not play for the team again until changes were made to a culture and set-up that was damaging to their “emotional state” and “well being”.
The Spanish federation made their writing of letters public and backed coach Jorge Vilda instead. Bonmati, Batlle and forward Mariona Caldentey were the only three of the 15 complainants to be included in the squad for Australia and New Zealand 2023.
In the wake of their World Cup victory, Bonmati used her platform when receiving an Uefa award for the best European player to point out the parallels with women everywhere.
“We gained the World Cup, however we’re not speaking lots about that due to some issues I [would] slightly not ignore,” she stated on stage in Monaco.
“As a society, we can not enable the abuse of energy in an expert relationship, in addition to acts of disrespect.
“I would like to extend my support from my team-mate Jenni to all women going through the same.”
The ability of phrases and the significance of her profile is a part of the legacy of Bonmati’s upbringing.
Having gained the sport’s high particular person, membership and worldwide honours, what’s subsequent for Bonmati to intention for?
Batlle insists there are loads extra targets to attain.
“We no longer think about being world champions; instead, we want to be Olympic champions or secure another victory in the Champions League,” she stated of Spain and Barcelona’s subsequent aims.
But Bonmati’s biggest legacy might not be within the trophy cupboard. Six years in the past, again at her first membership of CD Ribes, there was no feminine crew.
Now locals describe Bonmati because the ‘godmother’ of a membership which may boast 180 women taking part in throughout 14 groups. It’s a transformation that has been mirrored throughout the nation.
9 years in the past, there have been 44,873 registered feminine soccer gamers in Spain. In 2023, the full reached 100,000.
Bonmati nonetheless visits her first membership a few occasions a yr. When she does, there are extraordinary scenes. The women do not simply welcome her; they cry, combat, and even scratch themselves out of pure emotion for a photograph.
Her affect is just not solely felt in grand stadiums but it surely resonates deeply on the grassroots, the place desires are nurtured and the extent of competitors rises with every passing day.
Regardless of her impression and affect, Bonmati remains to be true to the quiet, reserved lady who began out on her journey. After she gained the Ballon d’Or in October, the household WhatsApp group wasn’t flooded with messages and behind-the-scenes selfies from Paris.
“We extended our congratulations, reaffirming our support for her,” remembered her aunt Lily.
“I also took a moment to reflect on our family, considering the award as a collective recognition of our shared efforts.
“Her response solely got here a couple of days later. We perceive her reserved manner; it is a part of who she is and the calls for of her career.”
Bonmati’s journey, marked by silent struggles and vocal triumphs, has not always been easy.
“Ambition is all properly and good, however behind it comes struggling,” she stated this summer season in an interview with El Pais.
For Bonmati, those words are more than a soundbite statement; they belong in an anthem of resilience that has played since the start.
