Aitana Bonmatí all the time asks the identical query. Each sport Barcelona Femení performs generates a flood of efficiency knowledge. The workforce’s health coaches know the way far every participant ran, how briskly, how lengthy. There’s a lot info, in actual fact, that they want two days to obtain it and tabulate it and parse it. Solely then is it handed again to the squad.
Not each participant pays a lot heed to that form of suggestions. Some disregard it fully. Bonmatí is totally different. She doesn’t simply need the reply; she desires to see the work, too. Greater than something, she desires to know the why.
“After some video games, you’re feeling so fatigued, so exhausted,” she mentioned. “However the knowledge may be low. That’s as a result of generally it’s not only a bodily factor. It may be to do with stress, with the nerves you had. I like to speak about it with the coaches. I wish to perceive why this stuff occur.”
So far as the uncooked figures go, the 25-year-old Bonmatí’s season seems like this: 9 targets scored, and 10 created, from midfield as Barcelona swept, but once more, to the Spanish title; 5 targets scored, and 7 extra created, within the Champions League on the way in which to her — and her membership’s — fourth closing in 5 years. Solely Wolfsburg’s Ewa Pajor has scored extra targets than Bonmatí. No one has extra assists.
The case that Bonmatí has been probably the most decisive, most precious participant in Europe this season is a compelling one. There’s a robust physique of proof, too, to recommend that she must be thought of the main candidate for the Ballon d’Or, at the very least till the World Cup rolls round.
The simplest clarification for why is one which she rejects with no second thought. It’s Bonmatí, the speculation goes, who has emerged as Barcelona’s heartbeat within the injury-enforced absence of Alexia Putellas, the membership’s captain. “She has taken an enormous duty in midfield,” Fridolina Rolfo, Barcelona’s Swedish striker, mentioned earlier this yr. “She deserves all the consideration, in my view.”
Bonmatí has a barely totally different interpretation. “The coach is the boss,” she mentioned. This season, that coach — Jonatan Giráldez — has requested her to play a extra superior function than in earlier years, not solely to mitigate the absence of Putellas however as a result of the presence of Patri Guijarro, Ingrid Engen and Keira Walsh means the membership is well-stocked with defensive midfielders. “The function has modified,” Bonmatí mentioned. “However not due to me.”
Changing Putellas, she mentioned, has been a collective effort. “The media all the time tries to seek out somebody within the workforce to concentrate on, and now this yr it’s me,” she mentioned. “However I’ve been having good seasons for the previous few years. I’m bold. I simply wish to be higher, extra full, than final yr.”
Standing out at Barcelona is extra advanced than it’d seem. Lucy Bronze, the English defender who moved to Catalonia final summer season, maybe captured it finest. At Barcelona, she mentioned earlier this yr, she has discovered herself surrounded by an virtually industrial amount of prodigiously gifted gamers, all spooling off the academy’s manufacturing line.
“There are identical to clones and clones and clones of those wonderful, technical, clever gamers,” she mentioned, sounding concurrently awe-struck and presumably just a bit frightened. “There are a whole bunch of them.”
That Bonmatí has been capable of stand out from that group — even at a membership that has been fastidiously calibrated to churn out excellence, and on a workforce that’s filled with the world’s most interesting gamers — may be attributed to her seek for completeness.
Xavi Hernández, the coach of Barcelona’s males’s workforce and Bonmatí’s childhood idol, described her as a “perfectionist” within the prologue to the e book she revealed final yr. She places it a unique manner. “I attempt to perceive the whole lot,” she mentioned. “I’m a really curious particular person.”
Cod psychology would recommend that she inherited that trait from her dad and mom: each teachers, each lecturers in Catalan literature, each sufficiently animated by the pursuit of equality that they pressured a change within the legislation to permit Bonmatí to take her mom’s surnames, somewhat than a patronymic adopted by a matronymic.
It’s a streak that Bonmatí has not misplaced, and one finest illustrated not a lot by her persevering with schooling — she is finding out sports activities administration, already conscious at age 25 of the necessity to put together for a life after soccer — however by her method to her profession itself.
Bonmatí is — her phrases — “all the time doing issues.” “Making a schedule is sort of difficult,” she mentioned. “I want to verify to get time for myself, as a result of in any other case I really feel like I can’t breathe.” Her teammates, she believes, contemplate her to be “hyperactive.”
She has roles, away from the sector, with the United Nations refugee company, with the Johan Cruyff Basis, with the Barcelona Basis. She works with a workforce for feminine refugees.
When Walsh and Bronze arrived at Barcelona, Bonmatí instantly volunteered to behave as their de facto translator. In the event that they wanted something, she advised them, they simply needed to inform her. The gesture was rooted in kindness, however there was a payoff, too. “It means I get to enhance my English,” she mentioned. There was no ulterior motive for that — Bonmatí wasn’t hoping to parlay it into an imminent transfer to England or america. She simply wished to be higher at English.
Virtually the whole lot Bonmatí does is geared towards a strategy of countless enchancment, of smoothing out flaws and ensuring nothing has gone unconsidered. She reads, and she or he reads extensively: Her residence, she mentioned, is stuffed with books on vitamin, on efficiency, on psychology. (Even her downtime just isn’t actually downtime: The likes of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl occupy the sunshine studying slot.)
“The extra issues that I do know, the extra I can apply what I do know,” she mentioned. “The smarter I’m about these topics, the higher it’s for my efficiency.”
Then there may be her kinesthetic studying: Away from Barcelona’s orbit, however with the membership’s blessing, she employs her personal health coach, nutritionist and psychologist. She questions them, too. “I wish to know what I’ve to enhance, and the way to do it,” she mentioned.
It isn’t precisely a shock, then, that Bonmatí is hardly happy by Barcelona’s achievement in reaching the Champions League closing but once more. It’s her, and her membership’s, third in a row, and their fourth total. This stage is so acquainted that Barcelona will go in because the heavy favourite to beat Wolfsburg on Saturday.
That’s an achievement in itself, in fact, testomony to how far Barcelona’s girls’s workforce has come, to the standing it has attained, to the progress made by Bonmatí and her teammates. That’s not what Bonmatí sees, although, when she seems on the knowledge. “We have now solely received one of many finals,” she mentioned. “We’ve misplaced two. Personally, I wish to win extra.”