Irene Paredes: Professionalism key for Spanish progress

Fans of women’s club football will know just how far the game has come in Spain in recent years, with world-record attendances grabbing the headlines in the UEFA Women’s Champions League this past season.

More than 60,000 supporters had already packed into Madrid’s Wanda Metropolitano Stadium to see Atlético face Barcelona in a league game back in 2019, and Barça raised the bar even higher during the 2021/22 Women’s Champions League campaign by attracting more than 90,000 supporters to knockout matches against Real Madrid and Wolfsburg.

The Barcelona team has featured Spain’s captain Irene Paredes, who returned to her homeland last summer after five years in France with Paris Saint-Germain. This has given her the perfect perspective to measure the advances in quality that Spanish football has enjoyed.

"It has evolved - every year, football in Spain improves," said the 31-year-old. "I was abroad for five years, and the change has been significant in terms of the competition and, above all, the players, with the effort and impetus that the clubs are putting in. We still need more to make the league more competitive, but there has been a lot of change, and we just need to strive for more."

That transformation has been reflected on the international stage, with Spain among the sides tipped to go all the way at Women's EURO 2022 – thanks in no small part to a deliberate Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) strategy to professionalise women's football.

It has made for a marked difference according to Paredes, who played at the last two Women's EUROs in 2013 and 2017.

"We were an amateur team, and now we are professional," she said. "In Spain, the teams have become professional, and the players are better prepared. We have everything to allow us to fully focus on football. Nine years ago, that wasn’t the case, it’s a totally different team. Before, we had to play against the big teams. Now, we can go toe-to-toe with anyone.

"Everyone is saying that we are favourites – but we don’t see it like that," she continued. "The favourites are the teams that have won competitions before and made it to the finals. We haven’t done any of that.

"We’ve come a long way in recent years, we can take on to anyone but, at a EURO competition, everyone deserves to be here."