On March 5, 2017, Alexia Putellas Segura (Mollet del Vallès, Barcelona; 28 years old) wrote on Twitter a phrase from the legendary mountaineer and explorer Edmund Hillary: “It is not the mountain that we conquer, but ourselves.”
The first mountain that Putellas climbed was in a medium-sized city on the outskirts of Barcelona, Mollet del Vallès, specifically in a square in front of the City Hall where the kids got together to play football. She sent one: she, the only girl of those late nineties who played in the Plaza de Mollet. And in recess at her school. “Sometimes other girls got involved, but not much,” she told Vicente del Bosque a year ago in a talk in EL PAÍS. “I noticed an absolute normality, the same as the children had. And it’s nice because many of those children with whom I started in the plaza when I was three years old are still my friends today. Directly, I made the teams. She was already a bit bossy as a child.” “One day, when I went to meet her and her mother to sign her for Barça,” says her former coach Xavi Llorens, “we met in a bar next to her house. They showed me an area and said: here was the field. If there is a soccer field in front of your house, and that is all you see when you leave the portal, you have a lot of livestock”.
Daughter of Jaume Putellas and Elisabet Segura (“Mami estàs bé? T’estimo”, she wrote to her mother the day after winning the Ballon d’Or, as reported by La Vanguardia. “Estic molt bé. Que tinguis un bon dia, t ‘estimo”), and Alba’s older sister, Alexia lost her father suddenly at the age of 18, when the man, a fan of Barcelona, died at the age of 50. His life and career are not understood without that news (“For whom I do everything, I hope you are very proud of your daughter: wherever you are, this is for you, dad”, he said in Paris when collecting his first Ballon d’Or) . There are reasons to believe it. Jaume Putellas, a worker at the Honda factory, died not without seeing her daughter become an icon of world football, but without seeing her playing as a professional, and winning, in the club of her dreams, Barcelona. The girl began to play at Sabadell, she went to the lower categories of Barça and, there, a restructuring forced her to leave it. It is told by Xavi Llorens, an essential figure in the Catalan club: first coach of Leo Messi and Alexia Putellas, 11 seasons at the helm of the women’s Barcelona, full of titles and, today, coach of Catalonia.
Llorens called Jaume, Alexia’s father, in 2006 to give him the bad news: the club had to reduce the teams with certain ages to four, the youngest would be girls born in 1992 and Alexia, for having been born in 1994, he stayed out. Llorens remembers the conversation.
“There’s no team for her. The best thing is to look for another one to return to in the future when you are of age.
“Is there a chance he’s just going to train?” James answered.
“I told him the truth: there would be no problem. But, due to previous experiences, that the girl can only come to train and cannot play, is hurting her. The girl needs to play. She had to find a team, and come back when she could, ”says Llorens on the phone.
He went to play for Espanyol, where he reached the first team in the 2010/2011 season, at the age of 16. The following year she played for Levante, the first year of her life in which she lived alone. And she was there when she, one day in May, received a call informing her that her father was in the hospital (the family has always reserved the reason for her death). He was, say those who know her, the great support of her life, the man she trusted the most and the one who trusted her the most. She returned to Barcelona, with her family; she returned to Barça, and she began to climb, without her father, the last mountain of all: the one that would allow her to conquer herself.
“He reminds me of Leo somewhat,” says Llorens. “She is very shy and speaks little, but when he does speak, he nails it. She is concise, she likes to control everything. She looks a lot, she observes a lot. And she speaks little. But when she speaks, she says it very clearly. The little intervention that Leo had was with his trusted companions in the group, and Alexia has always been like that. She now knows what she is: a reference for all her colleagues. But she likes to be observing, looking and staying with the details. She does not like to be the protagonist nor is she the one who talks all the time ”. Her coach last season, Lluís Cortés, says that she knows how to be a committed leader within the team and on the field. “He helps the others play. She makes her classmates better. Regarding the team, training, performance, team management, she is a leader. And as a coach I leaned a lot on that leadership.” Although, as sources from the soccer player’s environment certify, she shies away from championing causes. She militates in them (feminism, LGTBI rights), and in fact participated in the 2019 Madrid Pride with her friend and teammate Jennifer Hermoso (Blanca Suárez and Mario Casas were on the float, among others), but she does not like be the visible head of anything that has nothing to do with football. Recently, in an unprecedented gesture, she refused the Mollet del Vallès football field to bear her name, as the mayor offered her. She is still called Hermanos Gonzalvo, legends of Catalan football.
She is not a very outgoing girl, “nor the one who organizes her group’s parties, to understand us,” say those who have known her for years. She is shy and has a hard time expressing her feelings. She can also be very cold, and that coldness on the field, where her passion is, helps her to be a much better soccer player, to temper her nerves, to control the game in the limit moments. Her game has been evolving until it fully exploded three years ago under the baton of Lluís Cortés, when she became the total soccer player. “The leap to stardom occurs when she gains experience”, says Xavi Llorens, “and she learns to control all the tempos of a game: when to play fast, when to play slow. On top of that, she has some physical and technical virtues that make her finish and make a difference”.
He moves like a shark down the pitch: sensing blood from a distance, knowing when to do damage and when to wait to do it, and managing the team from inside left with a prodigious left foot. Before, he opened up more to the band, but speed is not his main virtue (“I know I’m not going to win a 60-meter race,” he said in EL PAÍS). In recent years, he has improved his gaps and enhanced his virtues. He is the reference in the zone of progression of the attack of Barcelona and the Spanish team in making last passes, in receiving between the lines, in shaping himself to help the team, especially in the zone of progression. And when the team is drowning in construction, he goes down to receive more at the 6 position or near central to be able to generate play. “And she is”, abounds Lluís Cortés, the coach with whom she won a treble last season (League, Cup and Champions League), “a great finisher. Before she didn’t have so many goals: now she is a scorer. A midfielder who creates games with so many assists and so many goals is what she is: the best in the world”.
On one occasion, Putellas confessed to Llorens when he spoke to him about the need to have alternatives (studies, training) in case a sport as little established at the time as women’s football did not guarantee him a present and a future: “I’m going to now dedicate 100% to football: I want to know where I am going”. “What has he done?” Llorens wonders. “Dedicate yourself 100% to football. And thanks to football, and who he is and what he has won (16 titles in nine years with Barcelona and the national team), he has another life, economically, with the representation of many firms”.
Putellas is a very powerful brand. It is the best of a sport in effervescence with a political symbolism of the first level: it is about telling girls around the world that the most popular sport on the planet is not just a matter of boys; that you can become a professional, that you can get to fill, like the men, the Camp Nou. Although the differences are still abysmal.
“Abyssal”, clarifies Lluís Cortés, “between men’s football and women’s football, and within women’s football”. An information from the economic newspaper Expansion He calculated a few days ago that the salary of the female Ballon d’Or was 100 times less than that of the male Ballon d’Or, Karim Benzema. And he estimated Putellas’ salary at 150,000 euros gross per year for the 18 million of Barça’s male star, Robert Lewandowski. Other sources put the salary of a superstar like Putellas at around 300,000 or 350,000 euros gross. In any case, the difference is great. “In the Spanish League right now we have players who are receiving the minimum wage. They are 16,000 euros for a full day, but some soccer players are registered part-time and they go to 12,000 gross per year. Now it seems that there will be a renegotiation of the collective agreement in which that minimum wage will be raised. But it’s not just that anymore: travel conditions, stadium conditions. You watch First Division matches on pitches that are not adjusted to what a competition like this should be”.
A fan of the Xavi player, total midfielder, and number 11 like Rivaldo, his idol as a child, Alexia Putellas has inaugurated a time in which girls, when they grow up, will no longer want to be like a man, but, among others, like her. The highest mountain, and the greatest conquest of all.
You can follow EL PAÍS Sports in Facebook Y Twitteror sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
#Alexia #Putellass #journey #Ballon #dOr