It's about time! Aitana Bonmati's Ballon d'Or triumph gives Barcelona & Spain star long overdue individual recognition

Those who have known Bonmati since she was a little girl have known for a long time that she is special. She would play football in the playground, in the square in the centre of town – anywhere, really – and she caught the eye even then.

She would often face difficulties as the only girl Xavier Rovira, a friend of the Barcelona star since they were around four years old, remembers as much, but that was never going to stop her. “Her character helped her overcome all of this because she just wanted to play football,” he tells GOAL.

It’s no surprise that she was iron-willed even then. After all, Bonmati's parents went against Spain's traditional naming customs and so the surname by which she is known is that of her mother, not her father. Strong values have been instilled in her since she was a child.

“Since we were little, you could see that she wasn't normal,” Rovira says. “She played sometimes at the same level or better than many boys. That was not normal at all. We knew that she was a bit special.”

Born and raised in Sant Pere de Ribes, a small Catalonian town around 40 kilometres from Barcelona, Bonmati joined the Blaugrana when she was 14 years old. Her family, her friends, they are all fans of the club, and the midfielder’s biggest idols all played in its iconic blue and garnet colours – Xavi, Andres Iniesta and Pep Guardiola.

Bonmati was promoted to the B team when she was 16 years old. Two years later, she was playing under Xavi Llorens in the first team, having shown "the personality and courage" to do so, the coach told L'Esportiu.

Today, in her own words, she is “carrying the [club’s] DNA in [her]” after 11 years at Barca. She is a midfielder in the tiki-taka mould, one who can perform so many different roles and help the team in so many different ways, one playing world-class football for the club of her heart, FC Barcelona.

She is living her dream, but to reach the top of the mountain has not been without obstacles. Indeed, what Bonmati has achieved was simply impossible when she first started to fall in love with this sport.

“She did not have a reference in women's football so it was a bit impossible to think about becoming a professional player,” Rovira remembers. “It was difficult to imagine being able to dedicate oneself professionally. We didn't talk about her playing for Barca or playing in the Champions League. It was something impossible at that time.”

With the women’s game still having so much room to grow, Bonmati was an anomaly as a young girl playing – and excelling – in football, too. “When she was a child, there were many times when she didn't have a good time,” Rovira adds. “Especially in high school, it was really accentuated. Somebody would insult her and then she would feel bad just for the fact that she was a woman who was playing football.

“Also, often she was better than them. She played better football than some boys, so this hurt the pride of some boys who found it difficult to assimilate how a girl was better than them. I think all this, overcoming these periods, is what gave her the leap to be able to reach the top. It wasn't easy for her to live through this period, mainly in high school. It was difficult.”

But Bonmati was never going to be stopped. She’s a very ambitious person, telling GOAL earlier this year: “I want to be the best version of me every year and show better things every year.” That has typified her character since she was a young girl, and it is that which Rovira believes helped her overcome some “hostile” environments when she was growing up.

“She's very ambitious,” he explains. “I think that it's difficult to influence her. I think that is something maybe she gets from her mother. Her mother is also a person with a very clear idea. She fought a lot in the past to achieve things, like with her surname.

“I think that she has always been very ambitious. She's a very perfectionist person. I think that her own character is what has brought her to where she is today. It's not something about [those on the] outside, it's more something about her inside.”

That burning desire to constantly be better is what has driven Bonmati to the height of winning the Ballon d’Or. Anyone who has watched Barcelona for the last few years will tell you that the 25-year-old’s level has gone up and up and up. That is thanks to her constantly striving to improve, the occupation of different roles and responsibilities, and the big experiences that she has been exposed to along the way. Oh, and her incredible talent.

“I think this year, I have a different role in the team because last year the coach told me that when we build up the play, I had to be near the centre-backs to help,” she told GOAL back in April, explaining in detail – impressively so in a rare English interview – the things she was developing.

“Now, this year, this role is by Keira [Walsh] and Patri [Guijarro], and I am in a position that is more offensive. I am not that box-to-box player. I consider myself a player that always defends. If I have to go to my box to defend, I go. But maybe in the build-up, I am more offensive right now. I'm nearer to the box, so I have more chances, I score more goals, I provide more assists, maybe because my role has changed this year.

“I learn things when I'm near the box. I was not used to doing that last year, not like this year. I have scored a lot of goals with my left foot that last year I didn't, so I tried to improve because if you can shoot with both feet, it's better.

“Also, I'm little,” she said with a laugh, “but I try to help the team also in defensive tasks in every part of the pitch. Three or four years ago, I decided that if I wanted to be a complete player, I had to do those things also. Not only score and make assists, but also do defensive tasks to help the team.”

That she consciously noted what she needed to do to become that complete player underlines Bonmati's ambition. It also shows what a team player she is, as those defensive improvements are not headline-grabbing but they can help – and have helped – her side win matches and, in turn, titles.

Despite all of this, though, Bonmati hasn’t always got the individual recognition she deserves. The midfielder was named to the 2020-21 Women's Champions League Squad of the Season, having been the Player of the Match in the final, and she was in the Team of the Tournament after the European Championship in 2022. However, that was about it for major individual accolades before the 2022-23 campaign.

“I don't like to talk about these things because these things don't depend on the players, you know?” she told GOAL. “What I can say is that our goal, our work, is to do the best play every day, to be the best team. When you are the best team and you play well and you win everything, maybe you have more options to be there.

“Maybe you don't have to focus on this because it depends on a lot of things. If something has to come, it's going to come, but I prefer to focus on winning as a team and winning the Champions League, winning the league – winning,” she laughed. “And then we will see.”

It’s not something she says for show, either. In fact, it took Rovira to tell her that she had finished fifth in the running for the 2022 Ballon d’Or. “I was the one who sent her the screenshot,” he recalls. “She hadn't even seen it!”

It’s all a little bit different this year, then. Bonmati had another outstanding season in 2022-23, one that came off the back of that great Euros in which she was Spain’s star player before their elimination at the hands of eventual champions England in the quarter-finals.

The 25-year-old scored 19 goals and provided 21 assists in all competitions as Barca won the league, the Super Cup and the Champions League, and she was simply sensational in Spain's first-ever Women's World Cup triumph.

As a result, she’s scooped up those individual awards like never before, named UEFA's Women's Player of the Year, the Women's Champions League Player of the Season and collecting the World Cup's Golden Ball before this Ballon d’Or win.

What has changed? Why is she suddenly getting the spotlight? Her performances at the Euros last year certainly increased her profile, that’s for sure. In last season’s Champions League, no player was involved in more goals than Bonmati, either, with her displays on those big stages paying dividends.

The absence of Alexia Putellas, the 2021 and 2022 Ballon d’Or winner, has to be noted, too, as it changed Bonmati’s role and required several Barca and Spain players to adapt in order to ensure both teams still thrived despite one of the best in the world being sidelined for 10 months. Bonmati has been integral to club and country in that sense and it has been a delight to see that, in the process, more people have started to realise what a tremendous footballer she is.

"When Alexia won the first Ballon d'Or, people asked me who would be the next Catalan player to win it. I said: ‘Aitana’,” Llorens, the former Barca coach, told L'Esportiu in July. “Alexia is Alexia, but Aitana has her space and I think that now everyone has opened their eyes and appreciates her. It's no surprise to me.

"There is always a player who overshadows you. More visibility has been given to what Aitana does, which she did before, but it wasn't seen as much. I have a special affection for all the players I've coached and if people are now discovering Aitana, I'm glad, because she deserves it.”

And so here is Bonmati’s chance to soak up the spotlight. In a Barca team with so many stars, some will always get overlooked for their contributions. She’s not the only one to have been criminally omitted from contention for these individual awards – after all, star winger Caroline Graham Hansen has never been nominated for the Ballon d’Or, for example.

But Bonmati is getting her moment now and it is long overdue, that is for sure. The wonderful thing is that such individual triumphs are unlikely to change much about her, either. Bonmati has been on top of the world this year – a European champion with Barca, a world champion with Spain and now crowned the best player on the planet – but she won’t lose her ambition and her determination to get better. She never has.

She’s hardly changed since she was a little girl, even. When GOAL asks Rovira if the Aitana he knows today is different to the Aitana he met when he was a child, he pauses as he finds the best way to illustrate why the answer is no.

“She lives in Ribes, which is the village where she has always lived,” he explains. “It would be really easy for her to live in Barcelona, to go to training, to go to all the stuff like this. Everything is in Barcelona, you know? So the easiest option would be to live in Barcelona, but she's living in Ribes, in her town.

“I think that her priority has always been her people, the people she has lived with all her life, her friends, her family, and I think she's the same as when she was not a professional footballer. My perception as a friend is that nothing's changed.”

This week, after two Champions League triumphs and a World Cup win, she will take another famous and iconic trophy back to her family, her friends, and the people in that small town of little over 30,000 people. This time, though, it’s one engraved not with the name of a team but of Aitana Bonmati – and boy, does she deserve it.