Sorry Aitana, I'm not buying
The disrespect which continues to be shown to women's football teams in the year of our lord 2025 is not even the greatest injustice which Bonmatí has ever suffered.
This week, ahead of another expensive season of running a big football club, Barcelona have consulted the Rachel Reeves playbook for cutting the deficit and chosen to take resource away from a group of people who probably need it more than most.
That's right, say it with me — the women's team!
Barça's financial situation has been grim for a few years now, due to a combination of a ginormous wage bill and some dodgy decisions at board level. Apparently. I only briefly Googled this because it has nothing to do with this story, of course.
The story is up-and-coming defender Jana Fernández, who has been with Barcelona since she was 12. Last season, she broke into the first team, playing in 26 of the side's 30 La Liga F matches before making two appearances for Spain at EURO 2025. Everything's coming up Jana... right?
If you thought that being good at football and staying loyal means anything, think again. Today, the 23-year-old's worth is measured only by the wages which Barcelona will save as they terminate her contract and let her leave to London City Lionesses — on a free transfer!
I don't know what sum Fernández pockets each year, presumably more than enough to keep the lights on in Raphinha's garage, but nowhere close to the value of the dedication Fernández has shown to her club for more than a decade.
You imagine that Barcelona hope to go all the way in the Champions League again, but this move leaves them with just SEVENTEEN registered first team squad players for the 2025/2026 season. You probably don't need me to spell this out, but just so we're clear — as it stands, as few as two injuries will leave just four adequately-experienced players on the bench across a season where Barcelona could play 40 games, or more. At best the scene is set for tactical stagnation, at worst, Barça's medical team will need to have the season of their lives to protect the side's claim to being a European Big Boy.
To make the picture bleaker still, elsewhere this week the Spanish Football Federation (the RFEF) had the opportunity to put the horrors of the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023 firmly behind them, for good. It would already have been a couple of years too late, since the RFEF decided to fill the stinking gap left by head coach Jorge Vilda with someone steeped in the ick of it all — his assistant, Montserrat Tomé — instead of doing the sensible thing and starting properly afresh.
Tomé's contract is due to expire this summer and, after she fell short of Spain's goal of becoming European Champions, it makes sense to say 'bye bye'. But rather than burning the rotting culture to the ground and starting again — this time with ambition — the RFEF have promoted Under-23s coach Sonia Bermudez (who?), also ickified and with the barest of CVs to top it all off. Could the ideas of a football manager with a Wikipedia page shorter than my patience today stand up in the face of the tactical beefcake that is Sarina Wiegman at the 2027 World Cup? I fear not.
In that sense, it's good news for people who want England to complete their trophy cabinet, but as per the relative entertainment of an uber-competitive EURO 2025 vs a mellower EURO 2022, fans deserve to enjoy the excitement of winning in the most sensational circumstances. Sonia, I'm depending on YOU to make me howl internally in two summers' time and right now, I'm not sold.
And that's just me, a humble fan. Penny for the thoughts of Barcelona and Spain hot-shot Aitana Bonmatí this week? She deserves better.
Some might argue, however, that the disrespect which continues to be shown to women's football teams in the year of our lord 2025 is not even the greatest injustice which Bonmatí has ever suffered.
Come with me as I travel back in time to 2018, when Barcelona lost the away leg of their round of 32 tie to Champions League minnows BIIK Kazygurt in a shock defeat which offers plenty of comedy to take the edge off the State of the World Today™️.
Though, the most notable thing about the grainy highlights uploaded to YouTube by Some Guy Called Arnoldino is not even a joke — it's simply how far women's football has come in the last seven years which, depressingly, is the happy-clappy excuse the Barcelona board would likely fall back on in the rare event that they are properly held to account and asked to explain their way out of the naughty corner.
The so-called 'highlights' are almost as shocking as those which streak through the hair of BIIK Kazygurt captain Oksana Zheleznyak, their goalkeeper who dons a comedy jersey — adorned with no name, simply the number '99' — as her star turn means Barcelona end the first half with nothing to show for their dominance.
Things get really interesting just before the interval, when Kazakhstani champions BIIK Kazygurt set up for a corner just as the Barça manager Fran Sánchez is contentedly tucking his half time team talk — 'nice going, score a few!' — into his breast pocket.
It's a nifty in-swinger, which is helped along by a breeze and bounces off one Alexia Putellas, toward the goal-line and back again. Does it cross? It's probably no easier for referee Zuzana Valentová to say, on the day, than it is for me, seven years on, with only Arnoldino's low-fi images to persuade me one way or the other — but by God, does she give it, and the crowd shrieks with delight.
After the break, a BIIK Kazygurt player doubles their lead with a cross that finds the far corner and our Toni Duggan's efforts to claw one back for the Spanish side are a bit lacklustre.
Meantime, a 20-year-old Aitana Bonmatí has entered the fray as the visitors try and recover the kind of result that you would expect from a match-up of this kind.
Fourteen minutes into her substitute appearance, Bonmatí is gathering the ball in her own half — calmly, as she is wont to — when Gulnara Galbelia lunges at her little legs, with no warning whatsoever.
It's a bloody brilliant tackle, but Galbelia comes from behind, making it illegal. This mattered little to Ref Zuzy, nor did the stop-drop-and-roll by which Bonmatí hoped to bring it to her attention, which belongs under a glass case at the Museum of Spanish Melodrama, right next to Patri Guijarro's pratfall in the EURO 2025 final (the slow-mo footage of which I'm absolutely desperate to relive, if anyone can source it 🤞🏼).
Bonmatí tumbles backwards, then defies physics to fall forwards, somersaults really gingerly, then places her weary head onto her folded arm, clutches her ankle and holds the pose as Galbelia storms forward and fires home to make it 3-0. Ballon D'oh!
When I write, the dream is to convert the mundane into the magnificent with the use of words and imagination but today, I run out of sparkle, since there is no way I can elevate Bonmatí's only contribution to the game's highlights package beyond what it already is — one of the funniest dives I have ever seen (and I grew up watching Cristiano Ronaldo, har, har).
You can, and I strongly suggest you should, watch it here.
Was she in her rights to ask for a foul, albeit in a way of her own choosing, one wildly different from what other players would consider standard? Yes, she was! Would the whole thing have been so funny if it wasn't Aitana Bonmatí? I don't know!
I'm just grateful that it happened in the first place, and that Arnoldino put in the work so that we never forget it.
Indeed, we cannot take the archiving of women's football for granted. To add to the richness of this narrative, it could be that the Fernández listed among the subs is the Jana we began with today, 16 years old and giggling along from the Barcelona bench but, well, we all know how many Spanish people called Fernández there are out there. I won't bore you more by blasting off about how few records of past women's football games exist to cross-reference the things I say have happened on this blog.
Will I? Maybe next time. See u there 💋