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BARCELONA, Spain — These are the bare statistics of Barcelona Femení’s season so far. The team played nine matches in the league. Won nine matches in the league. In fact, he won them by such a large margin that the word “won” doesn’t quite capture him. Barcelona’s first match ended 5-0. So is the second one. He scored eight goals in his third and fourth games.
This was just the beginning. The next week they beat Alavés 9-1. Late last month, at the top of La Liga Fémenina, he faced Real Sociedad, a team that is theoretically still uncertain. It’s gone 8-1. In the midst of all this, she found time destroying arsenalThe undefeated leader of the English Women’s Super League.
Barcelona has made 11 appearances this season, including two appointments in the Champions League. Alavés conceded three goals, one against Real Sociedad and Arsenal each, and scored an almost unconvincing 60 goals. His coach, Jonatan Giráldez, evaluated all this evidence before concluding: Barcelona really should have scored more goals.
The natural assumption is that, if he’s not kidding, maybe he’s exaggerating for effect, but Giráldez is pretty serious. In your mind, this is a simple equation: simply put the numbers in the appropriate context. “We created over 200 chances,” Giráldez said. “So, if you look at it that way, we didn’t score many goals.”
This, of course, is the job of a manager: demanding constant improvement from players, denying them the luxury of resting on their laurels, avoiding the idea of satisfaction. “The coaches are like that, they always want more,” said Barcelona’s veteran defender Marta Torrejón.
Giráldez’s reasoning is more pragmatic. After the unexpected departure of his predecessor Lluís Cortés last summer, he was promoted to head coach just weeks after the club won not only the Spanish league and the domestic cup, but also their first Champions League title by beating Chelsea 4-0. in the final.
Giráldez, 29, was given the job in front of a group of other candidates – at least 20 coaches from around the world who speculatively submitted their resumes – essentially a continuity candidate, someone who knows “our ideas and our identity” as the identity of the club. said sporting director Markel Zubizarreta.
For Giráldez, this job is an important privilege and constant pressure. Barcelona, currently the preeminent team in women’s football, has standards to uphold and expectations to meet. By heart, he instinctively wants nothing more from his players; He does this because he knows what looks like a slight crack at this stage of the season can become a deadly fault line later.
“We conceded two goals from set pieces this season. (Real Sociedad’s Sanni Franssi’s third goal came from the counterattack.) “A corner, a free kick. When you win an 8-1 game, it’s not noticeable, but you can do it. We need to improve, because when we play against Lyon or Paris St.-Germain or Wolfsburg in the final rounds of the Champions League, that move can send us home.
“If we have 25 chances in a game, the keeper will save 13 and go 12 away. In a more balanced game we wouldn’t have many chances, so we have to make sure we get more. We have to find out why we didn’t score more: we conceded 9 goals against Alavés but knew we could score 15 goals.” I felt it. Why didn’t we throw it away?”
It’s important to acknowledge, appreciate and celebrate that it’s very difficult to score eight goals in a game, he adds. And then demand even better.
“You can win 8-0 and you still have a lot to improve,” said Giráldez. “My job is to identify what we did badly and change it. It’s about improving every detail.”
These details are not easy to find in Barcelona these days. In the eight years since Torrejón joined the club, it has changed almost beyond recognition. “It’s like a different place,” he said. “From zero to 100.”
When Torrejón arrived, the training was still done in the evening, as the players either went to college or went to work during the day. He had agreed with the promise that Barcelona, one of the fixtures of the Spanish national team at the time, would turn professional. There was talk of making significant investments, attracting sponsors, and building a winning team.
Torrejón said that when the move came in 2015, it felt “like luxury”: arriving at Barcelona’s training complex in the morning, having breakfast as a team, enjoying access to the club’s medical services, fitness staff and state of the art. – state-of-the-art facilities. Still, “it was impossible to think about winning the Champions League,” he said.
Barcelona, unlike many of their peers, has not chosen to use the financial strength of its parent club to fuel its growth. For “10 million euros”, or about $11.5 million, “you can buy a team of the best players in the world,” Zubizarreta said. “There are teams that have projects based on doing this. Lyon succeeded. Chelsea did it. Manchester City has an English core but that’s what they did.”
He said Barcelona wanted to do it differently. “The best thing we can do is be ourselves,” Zubizarreta said. Rather than raising his team with a string of superstars, he decided to let the players that needed to improve build a team that was “distinctively Barcelona”.
Progress was at a standstill. “It is very difficult to climb the ladder organically,” Torrejón said. There was a Champions League semi-final appearance in 2017, but the team finished second in the league for three consecutive years after Atletico Madrid. Perhaps that was the only conceptual difference between the men’s and women’s divisions of the club. “Maybe it wouldn’t be the best news if the men’s team didn’t win trophies to invest in the future,” Zubizarreta said.
The award looked like it was coming in 2019. Barcelona finished second in the league again, but qualified for their first Champions League final. He met Lyon. Harlem Globetrotters equivalent of the sport, in Budapest and swept in the first half.
“It was a mirror,” Zubizarreta said. “We could see how far we had to go.”
He called the club’s fitness experts as soon as he got back from Hungary. There was no shortage of talent, but he knew that Barcelona players needed to be fitter, faster and stronger to compete with the best clubs in Europe.
According to Giráldez, who was assistant coach at the time, what followed was a “brutal” change in the way Barcelona trained. “We can develop rapidly at the beginning,” he said. But as players got higher on the curve, they had to work harder for even the smallest wins.
This approach has become so ingrained within the club that it has even endured what seems like a top: the treble that Cortés won last season, Chelsea’s destruction In the Champions League final, reflecting Barcelona’s experience against Lyon two years ago.
And so, even now, Giráldez can watch his all-around champion team score five and six and eight and nine goals against their opponents – only in the league – plus 52 goals difference, and want more. And his actors can not only understand but appreciate his gentle rebukes and elaborate tape sessions.
“The secret is that we compete with ourselves,” Torrejón said. “You compete with your opponent for points or qualification, but you compete with yourself every day to get better for your place on the team. That’s the biggest struggle: with yourself. Coach can always ask for more, but we want it as a team. We are never satisfied.
“Why are you happy to score four when you should have scored eight?”
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