Kicking the ball down the road

 It is Easter Sunday.  Is it a public holiday - no, because it is a Sunday.  The road is full of cliffy splendour and short of places to go to and stare at the reviewed joy of it all.  There will be football but when is a mystery revealed by La Liga nearer the date.


It is one of the frustrations for the traveler that La Liga don’t tend to release the times till about three weeks before.  At this point we can point to the fact that Villarreal, where we are heading, will play Real Sociedad San Sebastian this weekend, but on which day and time is not to be told till near the event,



The day is nice, the rocks are imposing. Let’s talk Women’s Football before 1975.



The first known women's football teams in Spain were founded in Barcelona in 1914. A small football association, the Spanish Girl's Club, was set up and sponsored two teams, Montserrat and Giralda. They played their first match on 9th June 1914; both teams were initially coached by Jack Greenwell,   when he was also player-coach of FC Barcelona men's team, and then by Paco Bru. One sports paper said they would soon be able to compete with men's second or youth teams but the teams did not last long. A planned tour of France to play women's teams there was cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I, and Spanish Girl's Club stopped playing. Local newspapers continued to report on the women's teams in England, and suggested that women's football would soon reach Spain.



In 1920, there was report of a football match between women's teams in Irun. Some women in the 1920s found success playing in men's teams. Teenage goalkeeper Irene González competed for minutes with Rodrigo García Vizoso, while Ana Carmona Ruiz dressed as a man to join teams. There was also an international women's match between a French XI and British XI held in Barcelona in 1923, and "one of the most important clubs" in Barcelona started a women's team this year, before Belgian women's teams toured Spain in 1925.  

The outlook was more positive in the early 1930s, in conjunction with the growth of women's rights in the Second Spanish Republic, seeing high participation of women in sports. Several clubs that played football, among other sports, were founded during the decade, including Club Femení i d'Esports de Barcelona and Sección femenina de Hockey del Athletic Club de Madrid. In 1932, another association was created, this time in Valencia, for women's teams to play each other and develop the sport. It quickly sponsored four professional teams – Levante, España, Atlético and Valencia – which toured Spain and Latin America, while FC Barcelona added Ana María Martínez Sagi, who believed in feminism through sports, to its board of directors in 1934. 




The arrival of the Spanish Civil War effectively shut women out of football.  Franco wasn’t keen - who would guess?  As the regime weakened in the late 1960s, women began returning to football across Spain. This didn’t impress the Fascist Sección Femenina which actively spread disinformation and officially banning the promotion of anything related to women's football to try and prevent this.



Women began practicing athletics in Spain in 1960, when female relatives of male athletes began using the facilities at Montjuïc in Barcelona and, facing pushback, sought legal advice to say that as Barcelona citizens they could use any sports facility in the city; a decade later, Mundo Deportivo wrote that this set a precedent for women to play football, as the ban, something the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) took as a given, was probably not legal. The newspaper suggested that it would be reasonable for women's football to be brought under RFEF control rather than develop at its own pace.



Women's football in Spain took on a new popularity from 1969. A decade later, Mundo Deportivo attributed the "launch" of competitive women's football in Spain to the first Fuengirola Trophy in Fuengirola, There was no institutional support, despite the Spanish Football Federation not having any regulations prohibiting women's football. When UEFA polled its members in 1970, Spain was one of five that declined to provide information on women's football At the time, there were many women's teams regularly training in Catalonia, where there was publicity, and about 20 in Biscay and Gipuzkoa of the Basque Country, where women's football in Spain was most developed. Women's matches had halves of half an hour. The popularity continued to grow. In 1970, Barcelona Femení played to 60,000 at Camp Nou, in a double-header with the men's team, then to 40,000 in a Barcelona derby match in 1971.

The first domestic women's league in Spain was played in 1971–72, featuring teams in Catalonia. Victoria Hernández then became the first female footballer to sign a "professional" contract – one stipulating remuneration per game played – in 1971, and several players were good enough to join teams in other European countries.  Once Franco died things moved forward as a quicker pace.




More of everything tomorrow.













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