“These girls have revolutionized football,” the mother says to her daughter when she sees the crowd at El Prat airport. It’s 5:47 in the morning and she smiles as she advises the family’s grandfather, 89 years old and a regular on the Barça men’s trips, to sit down. “Go sit down dad, you’ll be tired all day.” She stays with the teenager queuing to collect tickets for one of the three charter planes that Barça has chartered for the women’s Champions League final.
The daughter is 12 years old and is a striker for her team in Sant Fruitós de Bages. At 6 she left him, fed up with the machismo of some teammates and the children’s parents. “Don’t pass it on to her,” they released. She switched to volleyball but now, with the Barça women’s ‘boom’, she has returned to football. If before she was almost the only girl in a boys’ team, now she already plays in an all-female team. It is just one of the achievements that Barça women have achieved off the pitch.
Culé tide in Turin pic.twitter.com/t8iDCMARA7
– Roger Pascual (@pascualroger1) May 21, 2022
pink and azulgrana
Turin wears two this Saturday in pink and azulgrana. The Italian city receives this super Saturday the visit of the Giro, but while waiting for the arrival of the ‘pink jersey’ the ‘maglie culés’ have thrashed the streets. Anonymous Barcelona fans, or media like Andreu Buenafuente, have been staining the streets of the Piedmontese capital. At noon, Piazza San Carlo, in the heart of Turin, was taken over by hundreds of ‘culés’ who, oblivious to the sun of justice, made themselves known with their songs, firecrackers and their boats of blue and scarlet smoke.
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Unlike other culés displacements, with a clear male majority, in Turin, as happened in the two historic matches at the Camp Nou, the women win by a landslide.
Juventus Stadium is expected to have 15,000 ‘culés’ fans in the first great mobilization of women’s Barça, for just 2,000 from Olympique de Lyon, reversing the proportion of the Budapest final three years ago. In 2019 there were only a thousand Barcelona fans in the Champions League final and last year the pandemic prevented the presence of the public. This Saturday the culé tide trusts to be able to give an extra energy so that the Barça of the records takes the second women’s Champions League to Barcelona and walks it on Sunday in a parade through the streets of the Catalan capital.