This is precisely the real failure. Women’s football in Spain confirmed in 2025 that it lives in a contradiction that can no longer be hidden: the greatest sporting successes in its history coexist with one of the worst managements in its history. … competitive structure. Never has so much been won since selection and the ecosystem that should support it have never been so weakened.
Spain can boast with authority of the Ballon d’Or (the last 5), world-renowned talents and a team that is a world champion, Nations Cup winner and European runner-up. It’s an exceptional generation that took Spanish women’s football to the top. But this success, however, is not born from a strong league, as one might expect, but from the luck of having extraordinary talents and the ability, undoubtedly, to know how to train and work with them. But all success cannot rest on these pillars. Spain has not built a model; brought together brilliant individuals.
The F League, in general, evokes a failed project. Economically, almost all clubs are structurally deficient and only survive thanks to money coming from the men’s section. There is no self-sufficiency, no self-sufficiency, no real control, no clear policy which guarantees viability. Competition is maintained thanks to internal transfers and not thanks to its own model. And this is the direct responsibility of its leaders. The plan and the strategy to achieve it are conspicuous by their absence.
In sport, the diagnosis is just as worrying. National competitions have become a procedure. Barça is currently sweeping with superiority, which undoubtedly impoverishes a predictable competition, lacking emotion. Real Madrid, the team we all expected to answer to the almighty Barcelona, is not taking off. Internally, things are no better: there is a gap that is widening and which condemns the league to uselessness and boredom. Any evidence that supports this story? Season after season, the drain of talent is incessant. Understandable, of course. Spanish players trained here find stability, salaries and projects outside that the F League cannot offer them, even remotely. Quality is exported, but we fail to retain value. A league that loses its best assets is a clearly mismanaged league.
The situation at the base is even more alarming. Abandoned training teams, lack of investment and total absence of a development plan. It is no coincidence that women’s football has ceased to be the sport with the most federal women’s licenses in Spain. Today, this leadership is occupied by basketball, which has managed to pamper its structure. Football was convinced that success would fix everything, but it’s today’s bread and tomorrow’s hunger. This year, moreover, reveals an even deeper and more worrying problem: that of selective institutional behavior. That is to say, Luis Rubiales’ sentence was confirmed and the institutions acted, rightly, with force and unanimity. But that same system remained silent in the face of player Daniela Caracas’ public complaint about a controversial episode featuring Mapi León. No declaration, no clear position, no explicit defense of the principles shouted from the rooftops a few months earlier. Consistency is also a form of justice, and in Spanish women’s football it is conspicuous by its absence.
F League leaders and the institutions that revolve around it celebrate the team’s triumphs as if they were their own, while using those successes as a smokescreen to mask the structural deficiencies and uncomfortable silences that become more evident every day. Spanish women’s football is today a national team sport and not a league sport. He shines when he competes away, but he still has a long way to go before he gets there at home. Spanish women’s football does not need more titles to demonstrate its worth. It needs leaders at the level of those who compete on the field. As long as the national team continues to fill the gaps in the system, the league will become empty, the base will deteriorate further and talent will continue to leave where it is valued. And then there will be no more international success to hide the truth: the problem was never with the footballersbut rather among those who managed everything else.
I hope 2026 brings some common sense to management, because it will depend on our ability to maintain a world reign that has cost so much money.
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