Raquel Cabezón, head of the Women’s Espanyol, coordinating grassroots football and the first team, will complete two years this June as head of the Catalan club. A journey synonymous with a ‘roller coaster’ where the first team, a historic player in the League, lost the category. At the gates of a derby (this Sunday is measured against Barça B), Espanyol remains the leader of the Iberdrola Challenge and steps strong, dreaming of promotion, the great challenge that will not be easy. Raquel, former footballer, an icon of Espanyol and one of the great pioneers of women’s football at the state level, analyzes the brutal explosion of women’s football in the last year and acknowledges feeling “a healthy envy”. Although she points out that without the work of those soccer players who “we crush a lot of stone” 20 years agoNow this sweet moment would not be lived. A more than authorized voice to analyze the ‘boom’ of women’s football and the great work that the blue and white club continues to do in this area.
Great game this Sunday against Barça B. How does the leader deal with it?
“It’s one more ‘final’. The team has now managed to be first, although it is true that all of us at the top are very close together, but we depend only on us. The team is doing well and has a good dynamic. We have to believe and not lose faith. It’s complicated by the format of the competition because only one direct from each group goes up. It’s one more ‘final’ but it’s against Barça that is always another incentive. We’re all very excited and want to return to the First Division, but we know the difficulties. Against Barça it will be a difficult and competitive match but I have no doubt that they will go all out and leave everything to them”
Doesn’t anything else go through your mind other than promotion?
“It is the great objective, it is clear. Espanyol has always been a history of women’s football. The year of the pandemic we were saved because everything stopped, but last year the relegation was finally consummated. From the first day we set ourselves the promotion as the only big goal, knowing that it will be complicated even if people didn’t think so. We lost points in previous months but now we are leaders and we depend on ourselves. Now to continue competing.
Hopefully we can climb but it will not be a ‘walk’ as some thought. Going down is sometimes very simple, but going up is complicated. The team is in a good dynamic and they have never stopped believing in that goal and hopefully we can say on the last day with our mouths wide open that we are the champions in the end. It is where Espanyol has to be, in the First Division”.
This month of June, it will be 2 years since she came to the position of maximum responsible for parakeet women’s football. Would she sign again now or does she regret it?
“When I was offered this position, I didn’t think too much about it. It was going back to work in the sport that you’ve liked all your life, even if it’s from another angle. It was being in contact with the soccer players and with the ‘green’, a great incentive for me. If they offered me the position now, I would sign again. I knew it would not be easy because of the dynamics that the team had been bringing for many years, not only because of the last ones. It is costing and it is difficult but we put all the will and desire in the world, although there are other factors that do not depend on us and that are important to continue competing”.
In Espanyol there are 101 underage footballers, a great responsibility
“With me, there is a great group behind. The goal is to build up the academy and have more and more girls playing for Espanyol. We are very happy, the results are good and, furthermore, the first team, since the arrival of Rubén Casado, has been nurturing a lot from the quarry, he pulls a lot from it. At Espanyol we have always had that label, nurturing ourselves from grassroots football, and we continue to do so”.
Raquel Cabezón, the head of women’s Espanyol
Seeing the explosion of women’s football last year, do you still think you were born 10 or 15 years too soon? A pioneer like you, how are you seeing all this revolution?
“I always think that they are very lucky to be able to live today in women’s football, but I am also very clear that without all that work that we did in my time and everything that was even done before, what we have today would not have been possible. “And there is also a long way to go. There is a great boom in women’s football and they are betting on it, both in clubs and in the media, but there is still a long way to go. Let us not come to the top because there is still a way to go.” If it is true that there is that healthy envy, then you see the soccer players and I think, damn, how lucky they are! And I always tell the players, value what you have because when I played all this did not exist. We barely had fields to train , we went where they left us late hours, I even played futsal before. I tell them that we played outside of Barcelona and we went by coach and slept inside the bus and the next day we played and came back and they look at me as if I were an alien errestre… I wish I could have lived through this time as a footballer but without our work back then, this wouldn’t be possible now”.
Espanyol footballer Adriana Martín said a few days ago on the program ‘Perico que vola’ that it seemed that “women’s football was invented by Barça”
“It seems that there is always a war between the two clubs, but in this case we do not enter into wars. It is true that today you read news not only about Barça, but about other teams, which fill fields and it seems as if women’s football is I would have invented now… And it hasn’t been invented now and I’m not just saying this in reference to Barça, which is the one that is having the most success and we congratulate them. You read things and listen to talk shows and it is true that it seems that this has been invented now and it is not true because women’s football has a long history behind it, a long way to go, and without the work of many people from many years ago, who fought a lot and broke a lot of stones, what happened today would not have happened, it would not have been achieved Now the fruits are coming, the results. But Adriana is right, women’s football has not been invented now”
You must be excited to see girls and boys with t-shirts with the names of soccer players on their backs
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“It’s one of the beautiful parts of all this. It’s not just that they’ve won a title and it’s in the news, but now there’s a following and fans that follow the women’s team, not just the men’s. At the Ciudad Deportiva Dani Jarque there are more and more girl soccer players and boys who come to watch their matches. And many families who are hooked on the Feminine, the atmosphere is simpler and more familiar. It is a delight to see little girls who play soccer and when they see the The ‘greats’ of the first team hallucinate and look at them with those faces of illusion and surprise like when my father took me to Sarrià and saw the first team players. Hopefully one day we will stop saying men’s and women’s football, it is football and both men and women can play. Little by little, everything is being equated, a little bit, except for the clear economic issue, because I think that on the men’s side it is very disproportionate. The important thing is that women’s football continues to grow and that girls can live from it and have the tools to be able to do it”.