Liga F’s collective agreement dies on 30 June. That is not a metaphor: article 4 of the text published in Spain’s Official State Gazette (BOE) sets that date as the end of its term. And three weeks out, the important question is not what each side will demand in the next negotiation. It is a more uncomfortable one: can anyone prove that what was signed last time ever existed beyond the paper?
What the agreement promises
It is only fair to start by acknowledging what the second agreement — signed in January 2025 by Liga F with the unions FUTPRO, Futbolistas ON and CCOO — put in writing. Articles 42 to 45 set out rights Spanish women’s football had spent years demanding: childcare during training sessions and matches until a player’s child turns three, breastfeeding rooms at both the training ground and the stadium, specialist staff to support pregnancy and the postpartum period, a working group on motherhood and a commitment to develop mental health initiatives. Coverage of the signing also highlighted improved conditions for long away trips.
On paper, it was the most ambitious agreement in the competition’s history on social rights. The problem is that, a year and a half later, the social chapter still lives almost exclusively there: on paper.
What can actually be verified
Of the entire social package, the only delivery Liga F itself has publicly quantified is 27 study grants, cited by its president, Beatriz Álvarez, at this season’s opening gala.
Of the rest there is no verifiable trace. No club has announced a crèche at its facilities. No breastfeeding room has appeared in a press release, a photograph, a stadium visit. Nor, as far as anyone knows, has there been a formal complaint over their absence. The agreement’s flagship rights inhabit a strange limbo: nobody can prove they exist, and nobody has certified they do not.
There are, however, two clues pointing in one particular direction. The first: in September 2025, FUTPRO — a union that signed the agreement — created its own “Motherhood Grants”, covering, among other costs, nursery fees and the hiring of carers. In other words: the union is paying out of its own pocket for what article 43 obliges the clubs to guarantee. The second: when AFE presented its demands for the next agreement in March, one of them was a “specific protocol for pregnancies, including pre- and postpartum care”. It was asking for something the current agreement already promises. Nobody asks for what they already have.
“An agreement is not measured by what it signs. It is measured by what a footballer can point to.”
The money, without optical illusions
This season’s minimum salary is 23,500 euros gross. The figure of 28,000 euros that circulated when the agreement was signed is not a right: it is a ceiling, conditional on Liga F’s commercial revenue exceeding ten million euros and generating a net profit that an auditor must certify at the end of each season. There is no record of that variable ever being triggered in any season of the agreement. Meanwhile, according to figures published by Marca last summer, around 130 of the competition’s 370 registered players earn less than 23,000 euros.
And where the agreement is enforceable, it has had to be enforced. In March 2025, following a complaint by FUTPRO, Spain’s Labour Inspectorate concluded that Granada had violated their players’ rights: failure to pay the agreed minimum salary, an unlawful 1% wage deduction channelled to the club’s foundation, and a void clause waiving severance pay. In June 2025, Levante Badalona captain Michele Vasconcelos publicly denounced unpaid wages affecting ten teammates; the club denied it and announced legal action.
The empty table
With that record, 30 June should be opening the most important negotiation in Liga F’s labour history. What it has opened, so far, is a lawsuit.
AFE — which did not sign the second agreement — formally served notice of termination on 27 March, within the deadline the text itself requires. A mediation at Spain’s SIMA arbitration service ended without agreement. On 3 June, elections were held to decide who sits on the union side of the negotiating table: the players backed AFE with 177 of 208 valid votes, 85%. That same day, FUTPRO, Futbolistas ON and CCOO — the three signatory unions of the expiring agreement — challenged the process before Spain’s National Court (Audiencia Nacional), alleging it was carried out unilaterally, without an agreed electoral framework and without visiting the dressing rooms of FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, Athletic Club, Eibar and Badalona Women. AFE maintains the process was “entirely legal, transparent and democratic”. Liga F, with Beatriz Álvarez freshly confirmed as president until 2030, had made no public statement at the time of writing.
The result: three weeks from expiry, the negotiating table for the third agreement has not been formed. The old agreement will not vanish — it remains in force while talks continue, with a CPI-linked rise counting towards the next deal — but Spanish women’s football arrives at its most important labour appointment with its representatives in court.
The gap nobody disputes
There is one area where the paper never promised much in the first place: the day after. The second agreement includes a commitment to develop a job-placement programme for players at the end of their careers; there is no news of it ever being developed. There are no supplementary pension contributions to offset short careers and low salaries. AFE’s demand to adapt sporting activity to a dual career points at the same void: a Liga F footballer can retire at 33 with her working life barely begun.
That is the right order for the conversation to come. First, verify what was signed: crèches, breastfeeding rooms and postpartum support must stop being articles in a PDF, and someone — the monitoring committee, the unions, this press — must be able to check, club by club, that they exist. Then, cover what was never there: the post-career transition and retirement. And only then the minimum salary figure, which will once again take all the headlines.
Because that is the lesson of the agreement now expiring: Spanish women’s football is no longer short of written rights. It is short of rights you can point to.
Editor’s note: an earlier version of this article, published on 3 June, stated that Liga F’s collective agreement did not provide for childcare, breastfeeding protocols or pregnancy support. That was not accurate: those rights have been set out in articles 42 to 45 of the second agreement since January 2025. The issue, as this rewritten and expanded version reflects, is whether they are being delivered.
