On 28 March 2026, RCD Espanyol beat Levante 1-0 at the Ciudad Deportiva Dani Jarque and mathematically secured their place in Liga F.
The date seemed to have been chosen by someone with a fondness for symmetry.
Exactly 55 years earlier, on 28 March 1971, a group of footballers dressed in blue and white had walked out onto the Camp Nou turf to contest the final of the Copa Pernod. Facing them were the Penya Femenina Barcelonista, the embryo of today’s Barça women’s side. In the stands, tens of thousands of people — more than 30,000 according to some sources, above 40,000 according to others: the attendances of 1971 never had a turnstile. Espanyol won 2-1.
That match was the first women’s derby in history. It was also the first title for a section born barely a few months earlier, and the beginning of a journey that would end up making the Periquito club one of the foundational institutions of Spanish women’s football.
More than half a century later, Espanyol were not celebrating a cup. They were securing the right to carry on for one more year in the top flight.
The distance between those two scenes contains the whole story.
Before women’s football had a place
There is no perfect founding document. The history of the early years of Spanish women’s football rarely offers that documentary comfort.
The Periquito section began to take shape around 1970. The exact date and the authorship of its creation admit different versions. Some sources point to Lluís Oliva, a businessman and a decisive figure in the team’s first steps. Others recall the role of Fina Torres, who would later serve as president. What is beyond dispute is that Julián Arcas, a former Espanyol forward, was their first coach.
The rest belongs to an era in which almost everything had to be built from scratch.
The players used shirts borrowed from the men’s team, paid for part of their kit and covered some of their travel out of their own pockets. The women’s side was not yet an established structure within the institution. It was a group of women opening up a space where there was barely any firm ground to walk on.
The 1971 victory at the Camp Nou did not come after years of preparation. It came practically at the beginning.
Espanyol beat Atlètic Sabadell in the semi-finals and then defeated the Barcelona side in front of an attendance hard to imagine today even for many Liga F fixtures. Over the following years they became a reference point in Catalan football and began to build a history that cannot be reduced to a footnote within the club’s men’s narrative.
Those footballers were not occupying a secondary section.
They were founding a tradition.
A past that will not fit in a trophy cabinet
Espanyol’s historical stature does not rest on age alone.
The club won their only league title in the 2005/06 season and completed that campaign with the Copa de la Reina. They also lifted the cup in 1996, 1997, 2009, 2010 and 2012. Six Copas in total.
For a significant part of the history of Spanish women’s football, Espanyol were not an endearing survivor nor an institution respected for its past. They were one of the teams that aspired to win.
That difference matters.
Sporting memory runs the risk of becoming distorted when viewed only from the present. The contemporary dominance of FC Barcelona can lead one to think that the distance between the two clubs was always the same. It was not. Before professionalisation transformed the scale of women’s football, Espanyol built one of the most important records in the country and turned the Barcelona derby into something more complex than a match with an obvious favourite.
This is not about demanding an impossible return to another era.
It is about understanding what was lost along the way.
Three years outside the top flight
The relegation of the 2020/21 season was not merely a bad campaign. It was the visible sign of a prolonged decline.
Espanyol spent three seasons in the second tier. For a club with their honours, the word historic stopped working as recognition and began to take on a dangerous meaning: that of an institution whose symbolic importance outweighs its real competitive heft.
The return came in May 2024, after overcoming AEM in the semi-finals and Osasuna in the decisive play-off tie. In the second leg of the final, played at the Dani Jarque, Espanyol overturned the deficit from the first leg and reclaimed their place in the top flight with a 3-1 win.
The celebration was necessary. Nostalgia, insufficient.
Returning to the top flight did not automatically repair what had happened during the preceding years. Nor did it restore Espanyol to the upper reaches of the table. It opened a different and considerably less cinematic chapter: the slow rebuilding of a project capable of not falling again.
On that terrain, progress is measured differently.
Learning to survive before trying to grow
Espanyol have closed the 2025/26 season in eleventh place with 31 points: seven wins, ten draws and thirteen defeats. They scored 28 goals and conceded 44.
These are not dazzling figures. They should not be dressed up.
Sara Monforte’s team have not yet made a competitive leap that would allow anyone to imagine an immediate return to the title-winning days. They remain part of that band of teams whose first objective is to secure survival. The difference from the previous season is that this time they managed it with room to spare: they confirmed their safety with six matchdays still to play.
Survival was not built on an unexpected great run, nor thanks to a stroke of fortune in the final match. It rested on a less eye-catching quality: Espanyol were able to recognise which were their decisive fixtures and to compete in them as such.
By the time they mathematically secured their place in the top flight, a good portion of their seven wins had come against the teams fighting at the bottom of the table. They won the decisive matches and scraped vital points against direct rivals to guarantee peace of mind.
They did not dominate the competition.
They understood their place within it.
That pragmatism may seem modest when set against the club’s honours list. In truth, it constitutes a necessary foundation. Projects are not rebuilt by pretending to carry on from where they left off. First they must accept where they are starting again from.
Romane Salvador and the seams of the team
There is one statistic that helps to explain both the strength and the limits of the season.
Romane Salvador finished the campaign as the goalkeeper with the most saves in the whole of Liga F: 101 interventions in 26 matches.
Her performance was a guarantee. It also reveals how much work she had to shoulder.
A team that needs so many interventions from its goalkeeper possesses a decisive footballer between the posts, but does not yet control matches as it would wish. Goalkeeping can turn defeats into draws and draws into narrow victories. It should not become the only stable mechanism of survival.
Espanyol have shown that they know how to resist.
The next step is to reduce the number of times they need to.
Recovering the memory without taking refuge in it
In April, the Fundació RCDE presented L’Espanyol en femení, a booklet dedicated to recovering the history of the women who have been part of the club. The gesture makes sense. An institution should not remember its pioneers only on round-number anniversaries or when it needs to build a communications campaign.
For too long, much of the memory of women’s football remained scattered across family photographs, press cuttings and testimonies that could disappear without trace. Documenting it is a cultural obligation.
But there is a delicate frontier.
History can function as a root or as a hiding place.
Espanyol cannot settle for being the club that was there before so many others. Nor for laying claim to an honours list that no contemporary result can erase. Tradition has value when it sets a standard of demand, not when it provides a sentimental alibi.
The pioneers of 1971 did not walk out at the Camp Nou to build a trophy cabinet.
They walked out to compete.
The place they have yet to reclaim
Liga F does not need Espanyol out of historical charity.
The competition can carry on without them, just as it carried on during their three seasons in the Segunda. Clubs do not keep a place in the top flight by virtue of age, number of titles or cultural importance. They keep it by winning enough points.
That does not mean every presence is interchangeable.
A league becomes richer when its institutions know their own history, when there are rivalries with memory and when women’s projects do not appear to have sprung up suddenly after professionalisation. Espanyol bring all of that. They bring a lineage that connects the precarious pitches of the seventies, the borrowed shirts, the first derby in front of more than 30,000 people at the Camp Nou, the league title of 2006 and the footballers who kept the section alive when the media spotlight barely existed.
But their future will not be resolved by appealing to any of those images.
After two consecutive seasons of survival, the question changes. It is no longer about whether Espanyol can return to the top flight. Nor whether they are capable of surviving for a season.
The question is how much they want to grow.
Turning the Dani Jarque into a stable competitive base. Developing talent without resigning themselves to losing it too soon. Building a squad that does not depend so much on resistance. Closing the gap to the league’s middle class. Deciding whether the women’s section forms a central part of the club’s sporting project or carries on living in an intermediate zone between institutional pride and prudent investment.
The past guarantees no answer.
It only makes it impossible to pretend the question does not matter.
RCD Espanyol have already shown that they know how to come back.
Now they must show that they have not come back merely to stay.