“Why wouldn’t they let you play football because you were a girl?”

“But why didn’t your parents want you to play football?” Biel asks with orange-eyed eyes. The little one makes no sense. “I don’t get it”: It’s also heard in the classroom whispering. The 23 students sitting in a circle look at Esther Torrecilla expectantly. They want an answer to a question that has never been raised. Aitana, one of the most attentive, stares at the former footballer who came to see them in the hour before the court: as if he needed an answer, as if the explanation that came out of Esther’s mouth resolve a doubt that has been with her for a long time. After a few seconds, the former footballer replied: “Because football was not a sport for girls.”

Reality makes its way to the innocence of the students of the Folch i Torres School in Badalona in a day organized by the Agrupació Barça Jugadors. The struggle that Esther had to face to play football leaves more than one of those present in the classroom speechless. “How come they didn’t let you play because you’re a girl?” They ask curiously once more. The answer is not easy, it is the result of decades of contempt for women in the world of sports. Esther’s childhood, however, was governed by this maxim: the ball always caught her eye. Like her brother, she wanted to go down to the building community camp where she lived so she might have fun, play, be a girl. And here was the problem.

Her mother, from the balcony of her house, controlled her and made her go upstairs. Esther, however, never gave up and played as a goalkeeper. The reason? It was the only place in the field that her mother might not see from the balcony. The faces of the students, hidden under the masks, are a poem. While the former footballer explains the obstacles she had to face until lifting the first FCB Women’s Queen’s Cup in 1994, all eyes are on her and her hands are slowly rising. The questions are constant, from the innocence, disbelief and curiosity of a 10-year-old. “If you played football you were one marimacho“explains the former Catalan footballer, who had to endure the children he played with addressing her as Sergio. Of course, a girl mightn’t play with them and also win them over, right? Her mother , who did not want him to play with the excuse that children might hurt him, had no argument to ban him from playing when, one day, behind the Miniestadi, they discovered that Barça had a team where everything was girls “She accepted that football made me happy, even though she didn’t,” Esther confesses.

Aitana does not take her eyes off her. He looks at her as if his story were a pole of attraction, as if everything were beyond a distant story, as if it were personal. “When I was a child I wanted to go to Badalona to play, where my brother is, but my grandfather told me that he wouldn’t get where my brother has gone. I was angry and told him that I might, but today I do artistic gymnastics “, explains the student. All the questions, so timely, and the smiles and looks make sense. Aitana is one of those girls who still has to suffer discrimination, the contempt of a world that sees them as strangers, stone guests. Esther’s words and experience, however, have made a dent in the ten-year-old girl, who, when the talk is over, runs out into the yard. “He encouraged me to play with the boys and girls once more,” he says with an ear-to-ear smile.