ON THIS DAY · 15 JUNE
The day’s anniversary in women’s football. Because to know where we are, it helps to remember where we come from.
Some dates feel historic the very day they happen. On 15 June 2021, exactly five years ago today, the Board of Directors of the Higher Sports Council (CSD) approved the professionalisation of the women’s top flight: it became the first professional women’s competition in Spain, on the same legal footing as the men’s. The CSD’s president at the time, José Manuel Franco, summed it up with a phrase that stuck: it settled “a historical debt” with players “discriminated against simply because of their gender”.
One misconception is worth clearing up, though. That day did not give birth to Spanish women’s football. There were already extraordinary players, serious clubs, leagues being contested and titles being won. Professionalisation created nothing: it recognised what the pitch had been proving for years. The institutions, quite simply, finally accepted a reality.
What changed that day
The decision opened the door to creating a body of its own to run the competition independently of the Royal Spanish Football Federation. From there would come, in the 2022-23 season, the first professional edition of the league, today Liga F. For the first time, the country’s top sixteen sides competed with professional status, a collective bargaining agreement and an employment framework that left behind the precariousness of part-time contracts.
It also brought the end of an embarrassing episode: the television blackout. For three seasons, much of the league couldn’t be watched anywhere, trapped in a dispute over broadcasting rights. That a country couldn’t see its own champions summed up, better than any speech, the place women’s football had been given. That was over.
What came next
The calendar helped. Less than a year after that agreement, in March 2022, the Camp Nou filled up twice to watch Barça’s women, with more than 91,000 people: a world attendance record for a women’s football match. In 2022-23, the first professional campaign, the Barcelona stadium posted its best average crowd of the century. And in the summer of 2023, Spain were crowned world champions, a triumph that multiplied sponsors, audiences and household names: Alexia, Aitana, Jenni, Olga Carmona ceased to be niche references.
On the labour front, the progress is less dramatic but more structural: the collective agreements have steadily raised the floor. The guaranteed minimum salary went from the 16,000 euros of the first agreement to the 23,500 of the 2025-26 season. The comparison with men’s football remains crushing — and it shouldn’t be dressed up: that minimum is a floor with cracks, with a 28,000-euro ceiling that has never been triggered and still a good number of registered players below the figure. But that isn’t the right question. The right one is whether a professional footballer is better protected today than five years ago. And the answer is yes.
Perhaps the deepest change, though, appears on no spreadsheet. For the first time, a girl starting out can picture an entire professional career without the idea sounding like a fantasy. She grows up watching televised matches, Alexia or Vicky López shirts as part of the everyday landscape, and a world-champion national team. Role models are invisible infrastructure, and that is one of the victories that is hardest to measure and weighs the most.
The floor and the ceiling
Not all of it is good news, and to deny that would be doing the game a disservice. Professionalising a competition does not guarantee its sustainability. Most clubs still depend on the men’s structures that prop them up; the budget gaps are enormous, with a Barça that has raised the level to heights almost no one can match; and average attendance still lags well behind the big European leagues. Professionalisation improved the floor. It hasn’t yet levelled the ceiling. Steps such as Liga F’s entry into the football pools (La Quiniela) from 2026-27 — with a right to a share of the takings — point towards a less dependent model, but the business still doesn’t stand on its own.
The structure, in dispute once more
And the anniversary arrives with a bittersweet note. The house that began to be built that 15 June has cracks again: the second collective bargaining agreement expires on 30 June 2026 and negotiations over the third have started out tangled in the courts. AFE, backed by more than 85% of the players in the elections of 3 June, sits down to negotiate while the signatories of the previous agreement challenge that mandate before the National Court. The win of 2021 was not a finishing line, but a starting point that has to be defended afresh every season.
That’s why the date is worth remembering. Not to celebrate that everything is done — it isn’t — but to measure the distance covered. Five years ago, the debate was whether women’s football deserved to be professional. Today it’s how to make it grow and, right now, who has the right to negotiate it. These are harder problems. They are also the problems of a sport that has already moved past having to justify its own existence. The starting line is no longer in question: it was crossed on a day like today.
