Barça Women or how to perpetuate a winning model

Barça Women and their successful model was one of the main topics discussed during the third day of the Sports Tomorrow Congress (WOM+N) ²⁰²¹. Organised by Barça Innovation Hub, the sports innovation congress is taking place this week at the FC Barcelona facilities and online. During the opening session for the Methodology (Coach) program, coach Jonatan Giráldez and the players, Alexia Putellas and Marta Torrejón, explained what a team needs to do to keep its winning run going.

Getting there is not the hard part, staying there is. One of the most common phrases in the world of sport and for Barça Women it represents a major challenge, because winning the treble last season - League, Queen's Cup, and Uefa Women's Champions League - has set a very high bar that is almost out of reach of every European football team.

Within this context, Giráldez, Putellas and Torrejón got together for a pre-recorded session as the panel took place as the same time as the UWCL match on Wednesday against Hoffenheim. The key to keep winning involves inspiring each member of the team to keep bettering themselves. "We can't think about what we've won, we can't stand still, we have to carry on reinventing ourselves, because the other teams keep improving", said Putellas. "It is a question of not settling for what you have and wanting to improve each day" added Torrejón.

As coach, Giráldez emphasised how the technical staff can help footballers in their pursuit of excellence. “Everything involves three lines of action: that the working group is qualified and has enough resources to manage everything involved with the team, to enable players to focus on their own work; that each individual player has the desire to develop; and that we can offer the group new ways of playing, with new resources and options to surprise rivals and become less predictable as a team”. The coach believes it is about being non-conformist and "embracing the challenge of winning four rather than three titles, as we didn't win the Spanish Supercup last season".

In addition to Barça Women, the Methodology program also featured a range of speakers who explained the different aspects involved with managing women's football teams. These included Milena Bertolini, coach of the Italian women's football team, Stefano Braghin, technical director of Juventus Women, Iraia Iturregi, coach of Athletic Club Femenino, Rita Guarino, coach of the Inter Milan women's team and Jorge Vilda, coach of the Spanish women's team.

Wednesday also featured the first day of the Nutrition and Performance program, with a focus on women's football. Participants included Toña Lizárraga and Mireia Porta from the FC Barcelona Nutrition Department, who had a round table discussion about the nutritional guidelines and protocols that Barça women players should follow, and they were joined by the women's first-team player, Mariona Caldentey. Caldentey underlined the importance of diet when it comes to footballer performance, “My performance changed when I changed my dietary habits." She added, "I used to pick up a lot of injuries and changing my diet helped with that. These changes meant I haven't missed a single day of training in two years and it has helped to complete many matches without the strains and pains I used to feel”.

Furthermore, Toña Lizárraga and Mireia Porta provided details on the main nutritional strateigies for Barça Women, which are essentially based on the following principles: diets can vary and are defined by the competitive calendar; paying attention to individual supplement use; doing specific work while injured; establishing nutritional protocols on match-days; considering each player's body composition and prescribing specific vitamin supplements for female footballers, given their physiology is different to men.