Former Teammate Says Playing With Boys Gave Aitana Bonmatí Unique Intensity
They once played together in the same Barcelona youth team but while Aitana Bonmatí went on to win the World Cup, María Garrido has found success commentating on her former club.
Now a journalist providing daily analysis of FC Barcelona on Twitch, Garrido once started ahead of the current golden girl of women’s sport, Aitana. Last year she wrote an in-depth feature on her childhood friend for the BBC and spoke to me about her memories of the young Aitana who last month was crowned The Best women’s player in the world at the FIFA Football Awards in London.
A year above the 12-year-old Aitana, midfielder Garrido fondly recalls the time they spent together in the FC Barcelona youth setup at the start of the last decade. “We shared a team for one year,” Garrido remembers. “I mean we were like kids, yes, but it’s true she had already this intensity, this way of seeing football in a different way to most people.”
“Aitana has grown a lot since then, mentally and physically. She had a really strong personality already. I remember her being on the substitute’s bench, she was angry. I was similar in that way. We both started playing with boys, which I think makes a difference in Spanish women’s football. You can really see a difference between the girls who used to play with boys and the girls who did not. You have another kind of intensity. I think this is really important for the story of Aitana.”
“We were not professionals but it was a really elitist football environment. We used to be girls that lived for that. We were teenagers, but we were not partying, we were not drinking or smoking. We were really focused on training four days a week, eating right and sleeping well, studying in the moments you have free.”
Raised in the Catalan town of Sant Pere de Ribes, 40 km outside of Barcelona, the young Aitana had to make the daily journey by public transport as her father had not passed his driving test and her mother was unable to drive due to the chronic pain brought about by suffering from fibromyalgia.
The young Garrido understood her position, also living outside the city. “I used to also live really far away from Barcelona because I am from a little town. I remember my father bringing me every day to training, driving for one hour and a half to the facility at Sant Joan Despi. She had a similar situation.”
Since 2021, FC Barcelona have opened the doors of their residential training complex called La Masia to young female players after creating a separate dorm area for young girls on site. Garrido regrets that this was not done earlier to give her a better chance of fulfilling her potential.
“Our parents brought us to training four times a week. We were the last to train in the day at 9 or 10pm. It means you arrive home at 2am and the next day you have to go to school. It could have been really, really different. It’s more professional to have La Masia, your coaches there, you live with your teammates. It’s really different to all these things that we used to do.”
Now, even talented foreign girls, like Giulia Dragoni, can be brought into the club to train and live at La Masia something which Garrido believes will make future Barcelona sides even stronger. “I think that the new generation of women at Barcelona, they are going to be at another level. Ten years ago, you couldn’t even dream of being a professional football player because everybody had to have a career, or be studying for a degree at university.”
“Now, there’s going to be a generation already born believing they have a chance to be a professional. They will have all the support, all the infrastructure to become a football player when ten years ago it was impossible to imagine that.”
In her first three seasons at FC Barcelona, Aitana struggled to break into the first team. It took the appointment of Lluís Cortés in 2019, who had coached her in his role in charge of the unofficial Catalan women’s national team, for Aitana to become a regular starter.
“She used to be always on the bench,” says Garrido. “She used to suffer a lot to earn some minutes on the pitch. Physically, she’s not really tall, she’s not really big. It’s true, she is strong, she has a really good musculature but it was a super-difficult time for her. She played a little bit more when Cortés became the first-team manager because they knew each other from the Catalan women’s national team.”
Although highly admired for her intricate technique and never-say-die attitude, Aitana was always in the shadow of the talismanic Alexia Putellas as Barcelona won their first UEFA Women’s Champions League title in 2021. It was Alexia who swept up all the plaudits and individual honors over the next two years until she suffered an untimely rupture to her anterior cruciate ligament on the eve of the UEFA Women’s Euro in 2022.
That injury would sideline Alexia for a year, but created an opportunity for someone to step into her more advanced position on the pitch. It was seized by Aitana. Garrido tells me, “it’s true that Alexia’s injury was good for her. Not only for the position, but having this role as a leader. It’s hard to say that, but I think that without Alexia’s injury maybe he would not have seen the maximum potential of Aitana because they have a similar role in the team.”
Now it is Aitana who has cleaned up at every award ceremony, succeeding Alexia as the holder of the Ballon D’Or as well as UEFA and FIFA’s Women’s Player of the Year. For someone who has always given so much to the media, the global spotlight placed upon her has created an insatiable demand on her time off the pitch.
Garrido believes that Aitana is acutely away of her image and her role as an ambassador for women’s sport. “She’s really careful always about what she says. She now is aware that she is in the focus of the world. At the same time, she finds a good moment and nice places to be a voice for young women and young football players.”
For Garrido, life took her on a different path which, after a circuitous route, has brought her back to the club she loves. “I had a really bad experience with a coach at Barcelona who treated me really badly. He had problems also with many other girls. It was horrible at that moment.”
“After that, my relationship with football changed totally. I used to play since I was four years old but at that moment, all my passion and my love for football, changed for other feelings like anxiety and stress. One day I want to talk about that, in a book or something else. I have seen other cases of women or girls suffering this. In that moment, I didn’t realize what this person was doing to me. Now that I am older, I am 26, I can say it was not my fault, it was not that I was not good enough.”
“It’s true, that since I was nine, my dream was to become a journalist. I studied journalism and law and when I finished I got a really good internship, I went to work in Berlin. I don’t know if it was fate but La Sexta, a television company in Spain, discovered me working at Camp Nou. I then started to work with them.”
María Garrido hosts her daily show on Twitch
MARÍA GARRIDO
Now, Garrido hosts her own platform on Twitch, one of the only female journalists to cover everything on the FC Barcelona’s men and women’s team each evening while offering simultaneous English translation. Having gained over 3,000 followers in just three weeks, Garrido is confident that her history as a semi-professional player gives her a unique perspective on the game.
“Most of the sport’s journalists, they have never been inside the pitch. I wasn’t searching this, but I think that was something that naturally happened because of my background, because of my roots. Now, it’s been four years already.”
