Follow the Women’s U19 Euro: Check the schedule, results, and full coverage of the Spanish national team in our tournament tracking page.
In the age of six-seven, here at FemGol we lean more towards one-two-one. Because, in Celia Segura’s case, 121 actually means something.
It is the number of goals she scored during the 2018/19 season with Barcelona’s under-12s, in a competition against boys’ teams. One hundred and twenty-one. Nobody in all of La Masia, neither among the boys nor the girls, scored more than her that year.
Celia was twelve and had already produced one of those figures that stop being merely a statistic. The 121 became an introduction, a label and a question that would follow her through the next stages of her development: what happens after you score more goals than anyone else?
The easy answer would be to keep scoring.
The real one was to learn to become a different footballer.
During the 2024 Under-17 World Cup she was asked again about that season. Segura admitted she was reminded of it often, but quickly cut off any attempt to keep her anchored in the past:
—It’s in the past now, so it doesn’t matter.
It was not contempt for what she had achieved. It was a way of protecting herself from it. The 121 goals could explain the child she had been, but they could not guarantee anything about the player she intended to become.
Growing up in an academy also means discovering that the thing which made you extraordinary stops being enough. The pitches grow bigger, the defences faster, and the spaces last less. It is no longer enough to reach the box before everyone else. You have to understand when to come out of it, how to combine with your teammates and from which areas you can do damage.
Segura’s profile has broadened along that journey. She can play as a number nine, but also start from either flank and work her way towards goal from there. She is not only a finisher waiting for the final action. She can take part in the build-up, swap positions and turn up in different zones of the attack.
Her role models also tell part of that evolution. As a girl she looked up to Alex Morgan, one of the great forwards of her generation. Over the years she began to pay particular attention to Claudia Pina, a footballer closer to the positions she occupies and to the way she moves between the box and the outer spaces.
The goals, in any case, never went away.
With Spain she became Under-17 European champion in 2024. Months later, in the World Cup final at that level, she put the side ahead against North Korea in the 61st minute. It looked like the goal that might complete another perfect tournament for that generation, but North Korea equalised and went on to win the title on penalties.
Spain came home as runners-up. Celia did so, what is more, with the tournament’s Bronze Ball and Bronze Boot. She had scored in a World Cup final and shown that her relationship with goal did not belong solely to one extraordinary season of youth football.
In 2025 she added the Under-19 Euros to her record. She was one of the names in a generation that extended Spain’s dominance in the youth categories and linked the continental Under-17 and Under-19 titles. To reach the 2026 tournament she once again turned up where she was expected: she was Spain’s top scorer in qualifying, with five goals.
The national team has let her compete for titles while at Barcelona she continues down a much narrower path. Segura belongs to the reserve side of a club whose first team gathers some of the best attackers in the world. Reaching its door is already hard. Finding a stable place inside it is harder still.
Her official debut came on 5 February 2025, in the Copa Catalunya semi-finals against AEM. Pere Romeu handed debuts that night to six players from the reserves, but Celia was the only one to appear in the starting eleven. She played the first half at the Camp d’Esports in Lleida, in front of almost 10,000 spectators, and began turning into the present something that until then had been a promise.
At half-time she gave way to Vicky López. At that very moment Claudia Pina came on — the footballer Segura says she now studies for positions and movements close to her own. Pina scored two of Barcelona’s six goals.
The coincidence summed up, almost unintentionally, the distance Celia was trying to travel: one of her role models walked onto the pitch just as she finished her first forty-five minutes with the first team.
A second official appearance followed. It is still not enough minutes to know what place she might occupy at Barcelona, but it is enough to understand what the challenge is now.
At twelve, Celia Segura had to learn to live with an enormous figure. At nineteen she needs something far less spectacular and far more important: continuity, matches and a space in which to turn everything she has learned into senior football.
The 121 serve to remind us where she comes from. The goal in a World Cup final, the five strikes in this qualifying campaign and her first steps with Barcelona explain where she is trying to go.
The one-two-one set the counter back to zero some time ago.