My first year working as a sports journalist, during my final year at university, coincided with the arrival of a player roughly my age at Barcelona. Her name was Alexia Putellas.
She was 18 and had already spent a season (2005–06) with Barca’s youth team before moving on to Espanyol and Levante. At the time, both clubs were among the strongest in Spanish women’s football.
It was July 2012. Barcelona had just won their first league title and were set for a debut Champions League campaign. The women’s section had been neglected for years, but under coach Xavi Llorens, the club wanted to build. Putellas would be the star signing. But back then, she was a young, shy player who started out on the left wing.
When Putellas arrived, Barcelona’s women’s team did not have their own dedicated training pitch, and other facilities were lacking too. They would get changed in bleak dressing rooms where players would fight to be first in line for the showers, because there was never enough hot water for everyone.
She arrived with a serious expression. We would later learn that she had lost her father just a few months earlier, the person with whom she had so often gone to Camp Nou to watch Barca’s men’s team when she was a young child. His dream was to see her play for Barca, and she would fulfil it for him. Of course she would.
Just two months after signing, Putellas was part of Barcelona’s starting line-up for their Champions League debut against Arsenal. The tie ended in a 7-0 aggregate defeat for Barca. “They were like aeroplanes,” Putellas later told me.
At that time, Barca’s best players were leaving to play in the United States, France or Germany. Spain didn’t seem interested in women’s football. The Spanish national team lacked ambition, and the domestic league was far behind its European rivals.
“Putellas won’t be here long before she leaves too,” I thought in the early years. But she didn’t. She stayed. And she was already standing out.
How good she was on the pitch contrasted with how shy she seemed in front of the media. Always in the background, without fanfare, even though the spotlight sought her. But she quickly earned the respect of her team-mates, and by age 24 she was captain.
Putellas and Barcelona grew together. She represents the evolution of a team that would become the best in the world.
In 2015, Barca’s women’s team turned professional. In 2019, they played their first Champions League final, where Lyon crushed them 4-1. At the airport after the match, Putellas told coach Lluis Cortes: “Tell us what we need to be the best team in Europe. We’ll do whatever it takes.”
They stepped it up a notch. They doubled their training sessions, made physical conditioning tougher, and the following season lost in the semi-finals 1-0 to Wolfsburg.
“There’s no distance between us and them,” Putellas told Barca TV after the second leg. She made sure of it.
Barcelona won their first Women’s Champions League title the next campaign, beating Chelsea 4-0 in the May 2021 final. Putellas scored her team’s second goal. Later that year, she picked up the first of two consecutive Ballon d’Ors — the first Spanish female player, and first from Barca, to win the prize.
Barcelona have featured in every Champions League final since that first success, adding three further titles in 2023, 2024 and 2026. In the process, Putellas has changed, and each version of her has mirrored the team’s evolution. The team’s successes were her successes because she and the club have been one for such a long time.
Some of the most iconic images of Barcelona in recent years belong to her.
When the women’s team played for the first time in front of a crowd at the Camp Nou, beating Real Madrid 5-2 in their Champions League quarter-final second leg of March 2022, the fans chanted: “There’s only one queen, Alexia Putellas.” She bowed.
When Barcelona beat Lyon to win the 2024 Champions League final in Bilbao, the image of the match was Putellas taking her shirt off in celebration after scoring the 95th-minute goal that sealed a 2-0 victory, just moments after making her return from a torn anterior cruciate ligament.
When Barcelona beat Bayern Munich in this year’s semi-finals earlier this month, Putellas was in tears following the second leg at the Camp Nou. We now know it was her final match at the stadium for Barca.
Now 32, Putellas is leaving Barca at the very top, after winning every possible title, and following a season worthy of another Ballon d’Or.
In a video posted on her social media set to Rosalia’s song Magnolias — which is about the Spanish singer’s imagined funeral — she said that Barcelona is a club you can’t support half-heartedly, and that she has given it her all. She said she felt privileged to have been part of the change.
In her 14 years at Barca, she has most embodied that change. She is a living legend, the club’s most iconic player, and her departure is a hugely important moment. Now it is the fans who are in tears as they bid farewell to their queen.
Putellas left behind that shy girl of 2012 who struggled to speak to the media. She became the glue that held the dressing room together during many moments of crisis. She was the role model for a generation, an idol to some of the game’s most gifted players.
Many can’t imagine Barcelona without Putellas, or Putellas without Barcelona. And honestly, neither can I. She is the only player — from both the women’s and men’s teams — who was still active at the club back in 2012, during my first year as a journalist.
I’ve grown up, too, watching her take the helm of the team and steer it to glory.
It has been an incredible ride. Thank you, Alexia. From all of us.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Barcelona, La Liga, Women’s Soccer, Women’s Champions League
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