A Barcelona star chases trophies and answers
Aitana Bonmatí always asks the same question. Every game that Barcelona Femení plays generates a deluge of performance data. The team’s fitness coaches know how far each player has run, how fast and how long. In fact, there is so much information that it takes them two days to download, tabulate and parse it. Only then will it be returned to the team.
Not every player pays much attention to that kind of feedback. Some ignore it completely. Bonmati is different. She doesn’t just want the answer; she also wants to see the work. She especially wants to know why.
“After a few games you feel so tired, so exhausted,” she said. “But the data may be low. That’s because sometimes it’s not just physical. It may be related to stress, to the nerves you had. I like to talk about it with the coaches. I want to understand why these things happen.”
In raw numbers, 25-year-old Bonmatí’s season looks like this: scoring nine goals and making ten from midfield as Barcelona won another Spanish title; scored five goals and scored a further seven in the Champions League en route to her – and her club’s – fourth final in five years. Only Wolfsburg’s Ewa Pajor has scored more goals than Bonmatí. No one has more assists.
The case that Bonmatí has been Europe’s most decisive, most valuable player this season is convincing. There is also a strong body of evidence suggesting she should be considered the leading contender for the Ballon d’Or, at least until the World Cup rolls around.
The easiest explanation for why is one that she dismisses without thinking. It is Bonmatí, the theory goes, who has emerged as Barcelona’s heartbeat in the injury-forced absence of the club’s captain Alexia Putellas. “She has taken a huge responsibility in midfield,” said Fridolina Rolfo, Barcelona’s Swedish striker, earlier this year. “She deserves all the attention as far as I’m concerned.”
Bonmatí has a slightly different interpretation. “The coach is the boss,” she said. This season, that coach – Jonatan Giráldez – has asked her to play a more advanced role than in previous years, not only to mitigate Putellas’ absence, but also because the presence of Patri Guijarro, Ingrid Engen and Keira Walsh means that the club is doing well. filled with defensive midfielders. “The role has changed,” said Bonmatí. “But not because of me.”
Replacing Putellas, she said, was a collective effort. “The media is always trying to find someone on the team to focus on, and this year it’s me,” she said. “But I have had good seasons in recent years. I am ambitious. I just want to be better, more complete than last year.”
Getting noticed at Barcelona is more complex than it seems. Lucy Bronze, the England defender who moved to Catalonia last summer, perhaps captured it best. At Barcelona, she said earlier this year, she was surrounded by an almost industrial amount of wonderfully gifted players, all of whom washed off the academy’s production line.
“There are just clones and clones and clones of these amazing, technical, intelligent players,” she said, awestruck and possibly a little scared at the same time. “There are hundreds.”
That Bonmatí has managed to stand out from that group – even at a club carefully calibrated to deliver excellence, and at a squad packed with the world’s best players – can be attributed to her quest for completeness.
Xavi Hernández, the coach of the Barcelona men’s team and Bonmatí’s childhood idol, described her as a “perfectionist” in the prologue of the book she published last year. She puts it differently. “I try to understand everything,” she said. “I am a very curious person.”
Cod psychology would suggest that she inherited that trait from her parents: both academics, both teachers of Catalan literature, both inspired enough by the pursuit of equality that they forced a change in the law to allow Bonmatí to take her mother’s surname, instead of a patronymic followed by a matronymic.
It’s a streak Bonmatí hasn’t lost, and one best illustrated not so much by her continuing education – she’s studying sports management, already aware at the age of 25 of the need to prepare for a life after football – but by her approach to her career itself.
Bonmatí is – in her words – “always doing things.” “Making a schedule is quite complicated,” she said. “I have to make sure I get time for myself, because otherwise I feel like I can’t breathe.” Her teammates, she believes, consider her “hyperactive.”
She has roles, off the field, at the United Nations Refugee Agency, at the Johan Cruyff Foundation, at the Barcelona Foundation. She works with a team for female refugees.
When Walsh and Bronze arrived in Barcelona, Bonmatí immediately volunteered to act as their de facto translator. If they needed anything, she told them, they should just tell her. The gesture was rooted in kindness, but there was also a reward. “It means I can improve my English,” she said. There was no ulterior motive for this – Bonmatí did not hope it would lead to an imminent move to England or the United States. She just wanted to get better at English.
Almost everything Bonmatí does focuses on a process of endless improvement, ironing out flaws and making sure nothing has gone unnoticed. She reads, and she reads a lot: her house, she said, is full of books on nutrition, on performance, on psychology. (Even her downtime isn’t really downtime: The likes of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl occupy the light reading spot.)
“The more things I know, the more I can apply what I know,” she said. “The smarter I am about those topics, the better it is for my performance.”
Then there’s her kinesthetic learning: away from the Barcelona job but with the club’s blessing, she employs her own fitness coach, nutritionist and psychologist. She also questions them. “I want to know what to improve and how to do it,” she said.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Bonmatí is hardly pleased with Barcelona’s performance to reach the Champions League final again. It is the third in a row and the fourth overall for her and her club. This stage is so familiar that Barcelona will go in as heavy favorites to beat Wolfsburg on Saturday.
That, of course, is an achievement in itself, a testament to how far the Barcelona women’s team has come, of the stature it has achieved, of the progress Bonmatí and her teammates have made. However, that is not what Bonmatí sees when she looks at the data. “We only won one of the finals,” she said. “We’ve lost two. Personally, I want to win more.”