Wednesday. 17:30 Hour and a half before the start of the Valencia-Barcelona match in F-League, the fans gradually begin to infiltrate: Valencian fans and culés lining up in front of the gates of the Antonio Puchades Stadium in the Ciudad Deportiva de Paterna. The prohibition sign is hanging. Valencia scarves, Barça flags, banners and jerseys from both teams begin to color the middle tier, to which access was closed around 6:15 p.m. to divert fans to the second tier.
The leader of the competition visited Valencia and the expectation was high. Although it was a weekday, cold, very muggy and in the middle of the afternoon, nearly 1,700 people didn’t want to miss the champion’s visit. From the Valencian club, they have enabled online ticket sales to avoid queues and to reassure fans that they would have a seat when they arrived at the stadium, as last season people queued hours before the ticket offices opened and many could not enter.
“You’ve already forced me to change places four times…”, a mother protested to her daughters, who wanted to be as close as possible to their idols and exchanged the high intermediate level for the front field level. They weren’t the only ones, many fans were planning the best strategy and place on the field to get a photo and signature from the players after the game. It was families, football teams, people of all ages…
As the two teams went out to warm up, two friends, Inés, 12, and Neus, 13, leaned against the railing and didn’t miss a single detail of the drills, not a single movement of each player. “Mapi, I want your shirt!” shouted Inés, who fell in love with Barça for women two years ago when she started playing football. “We skipped the upcoming training… Two months ago we already started talking about this game. It’s the first time I’ve seen Barça live,” he said. Neus, despite being from Valencia, was the first time he set foot in the Puchades. “We went to Valencia-Levante at the Mestalla and it I really enjoyed it because Asun is my favorite player and she scored a hat trick,” he recalled.
With the great anticipation of seeing Barcelona, the almost 600 loyal Valencian fans stand out, occupying the majority of the central stands in every game and not stopping cheering on their team throughout the 90 minutes. In terms of sport, the analysis is clear: it was another Barça monologue. The superiority of Jonatan Giráldez’s team is gigantic. Like Núria Rábano’s great play on the left. Although goalkeeper Sandra Paños said it wasn’t the team’s best game, the Luminous managed an easy 0-4 (Rölfo, m.3; Oshoala, m.15; Rölfo, m.22 and Bonmatí, m.47) , which for them represents the team’s 52nd consecutive win in La Liga and against Valencia, who tried to revolt with several dangerous arrivals in the area, including a great opportunity from Asun that Paños avoided with a great hand. But this is not new. The league is dominated by a Catalan team that has a much higher mobilization power than the rest.
You know what it means to fill the Camp Nou twice. They broke the world record by putting 91,553 people on the field in March last year, a number unmatched by their teammates from the men’s first team. They also fill their stadium, the Johan Cruyff, with around 5,000 people per game. But when they leave Barcelona, they also manage to mobilize supporters. There were long queues in Seville to buy a ticket for the Real Betis game; Large stadiums were also opened this season, such as the Heliodoro Rodríguez López in Tenerife, the Nuevo Colombino in Huelva or the Civitas Metropolitano in Atlético de Madrid, a game for which more than 20,000 tickets were sold.
“It’s super nice to get the love from everyone that they want to visit us because they know they’re going to enjoy football when we play and it’s the most important thing these fields are full for all the people that come and wanna come bet us they’ll see that this really works. Thanks to all the fans, both from Valencia and from us, who always try to support us,” explains Paños. The goalkeeper from Alicante fulfilled the dream of one of those girls who came to Puchades. While autographing the football players of a newly formed team that has been playing for nine months, the team’s goalkeeper burst into tears. “But why are you crying?” Paños asked. “It’s that I admire you very much and I want to be like you, even if I have a lot left,” the girl said through tears. “The most important thing is to keep going and working. Come here to hug you,” the culé said to him. And he went to the stands to hug him.
“We are privileged and privileged to be able to mobilize so many people and that they support us. Our duty and ambition is to try to play every game well to continue to excite people. Let’s not let it pass in one day and give the fans reasons to keep accompanying us and keep having that good football atmosphere. I think that’s how the people who came to Puchades felt and experienced it. It’s what football triggers when two good teams meet, when what’s happening on the pitch is attractive you give them reasons to do it again. It’s our responsibility to try in training to keep improving the version at football level, to keep giving people reasons to keep watching us, accompanying us and filling stadiums, because that’s the way,” explained Barca- Coach Jonatan Giráldez And that is the power of women’s Barcelona Proposing – and achieving after years of work – to get better every day and that their success, increasingly recognized, continues and transcends the pitch.
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