When I was a boy I didn’t like football. I liked strawberry chewing gum. And, if I’m honest, I didn’t much like the strawberry chewing gum either: what I wanted was the sticker inside.
I remember waiting for the school bus outside a little corner shop — the kind where the bill was tallied up right there on the counter, on a scrap of paper torn from a flour sack. These are the things that make you realise your age; most of you reading this probably won’t even know what I’m talking about. We’d crowd in there to spend a hundred pesetas on gum —I can feel a fresh grey hair sprouting with every sentence— which came to about twenty pieces of strawberry chewing gum that were, above all, twenty stickers bearing the faces of people I didn’t know from Adam.
And why did they matter so much, if I didn’t know them? Because it made no difference who they were. The point was something else: if you had the one somebody else was after, you were the one in charge. A simple but powerful little mechanism —turning strangers into heroes— and, deep down, there’s nothing wrong with it. We all need role models. The thing is to make sure our children’s are the best they can be.
What I didn’t see then, and only understand now, is that in that drawer of cardboard heroes there wasn’t a single woman. Not one. We swapped strikers, goalkeepers, moustachioed centre-backs… and not one of those faces belonged to a woman who played. It isn’t that I didn’t collect them: they didn’t exist. You can’t idolise what no one ever bothered to print.
While we fought over a sticker in the playground, the girls playing right next to us had no one to stick in an album, no one to look for in the next packet, no one to dream of.
That, at last, is changing. Today a girl can open a packet and find Aitana, Alexia, or the player who makes her want to run down to the park with a ball. She can stick her in her album, look for her in the next packet, dream of being her. That face, at last, exists.
It sounds like very little. It isn’t. It’s the difference between growing up seeing yourself in someone and growing up with no one to see yourself in.
So next time you go to buy the sticker packet, the shirt or the matchday ticket you were going to buy anyway, stop for a second. Maybe you can choose the album with the Liga F logo on the cover. Maybe Aitana’s shirt instead of Pedri’s. Maybe a Liga F match to spend the afternoon with your kids.
I’m not asking you to buy more. I’m asking that, since you’re buying anyway, you remember that one small choice can make sure no girl is ever again left without a single face to collect.
