If a month ago the red returned home crestfallen after being eliminated from the European Championship in the quarterfinals by England, which would end up being champion, today the name of Spain shines again thanks to the U-20 team, brand new world champion. Pedro López's players beat Japan by 3 goals to 1, with a brace from Barça's Salma Paralluelo –MVP of the final– included, and added the second star for the Spanish team. The first was the one conquered by the U-17 in 2018, with Toña Is on the bench and with players like Paralluelo herself, Claudia Pina or Jana Fernàndez, in their ranks. After the achievement of that first World Cup for Spain, the great potential that came from the lower categories was glimpsed. A potential that has not stopped growing in recent years thanks to the professionalization of soccer players and clubs. Today's young players are stronger, more technical… in short, they are better than their predecessors because they have been better trained.
"I still don't know what is going to mark Spanish women's football," coach Pedro López acknowledged with emotion. Yes, it was clearer to Salma Paralluelo “This is to continue making women's football visible. The lower categories are strong. You have to keep betting. This is going up! ”, She declared after receiving the trophy that accredited her as the best in the final. The Aragonese lost the opportunity to participate in her first absolute European Championship due to injury, but the tears of frustration have given way to the most absolute joy with this historic milestone for the U-20, which managed to get rid of the thorn of the last World Cup, when they fell in the final also against the nadeshiko. Despite the defeat, practically all the members of that team are today consecrated First Division footballers. This is the case of Patri Guijarro, Laia Aleixandri, Cata Coll, Damaris Egurrola or Aitana Bonmatí.
Precisely the one from Sant Pere de Ribes missed the final due to suspension after a rigorous card and expressed her pain through an emotional open letter that would reach Xavi Hernández himself, at that time a Barcelona player, who would contact her to encourage him , starting a relationship that lasts today. In fact, the current Barca coach wrote the prologue to the biography that the Catalan has published this year.
Four years later, Aitana Bonmatí is the benchmark for the new generations and inspires footballers like Júlia Bartel, also a Barça player, a midfielder who is compared to Barça's number 14 and who she turns to for advice whenever she can. "I have spoken with her many times, she gives me her advice and in everything she tells me, I will listen to her," she confesses.
For both Bartel and many of the internationals who have lifted this trophy in Costa Rica, the World Cup is not the first title they have won this summer. In early July, Spain were also crowned European Under-19 champions, with half the squad scoring a double with the Under-20s less than two months later. An exciting summer only marred by the outcome of the absolute in the European Championship in England. Next year there is an absolute World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and the winds of change are approaching. The internationals no longer want to settle for discreet participation in the big events and want to transfer the successes that we are seeing in the rest of the categories to the absolute one. As El Confidencial reported yesterday, the captains of the national team, the azulgranas Alexia Putellas, Irene Paredes and Patri Guijarro would have asked the Federation to dismiss Jorge Vilda, who was renewed for two more years just before the European Championship.
The consecration of Spanish soccer players, both at the level of successful clubs such as Barcelona, and in the growing triumphs of the lower categories, should also be reflected in the senior team, but it is a long process, like the one that the national team also went through masculine. At the end of the 1990s, the U-20 led by Xavi Hernández and Iker Casillas won Spain's first World Cup title in any category. Directed by Iñaki Sáez, curiously Japan was also the rival they beat in the 1999 final. It took a decade to transfer this success to the absolute team, which would win two consecutive European Championships (2008 and 2012) and their first and so far only World Cup , that of South Africa in 2010.
There is no doubt that women's football is growing at a frantic pace in recent years and the players are aware of it. They do not want to wait a decade to establish themselves at the top of the world scene, they want to hit the table and they are ready to fight for it.
