On 18 January 2017, Teresa Abelleira and Raquel Béjar arrived at Deportivo’s headquarters to sign their new contracts.
Tere was 17 years old. She was a midfielder who had arrived from Lérez and had already featured for Spain’s youth national teams. Raquel, a defender who arrived from Orzán, was about to turn 19.
The photograph from that day shows them alongside club president Tino Fernández, holding a Dépor shirt. They were not new signings. Both had spent several months playing for the team the club had created the previous summer.
What changed was their relationship with the club.
Tere and Raquel became its first professional players. Deportivo were also the first Galician club to award professional contracts to its women’s squad.
In the very same city, a teenager named Irene González had been paid to play football almost ninety years earlier.
Irene competed alongside men during the 1920s. She started as a striker, eventually moved into goal, and founded a club bearing her own name: Irene Fútbol Club. She was the only woman in the team and also its captain.
Between 1924 and 1927, she became a prominent figure in A Coruña. She earned money for playing at a time when no women’s football structure existed to recognise her as a professional footballer.
She is considered the first recorded woman to receive money for playing football in Spain. She died of tuberculosis in 1928, aged just 19.
Earning money to play, however, was not the same as holding a professional contract.
The following decades proved that sporting success did not guarantee that possibility either.
Karbo was founded in 1968 in the A Coruña neighbourhood of Os Mallos. Its players studied or worked while training and competing in tournaments that lacked official federation recognition for years.
When the first national championships were finally organised, the team dominated them. They won the 1981 Copa Reina Sofía and the first three official editions of the Copa de la Reina in 1983, 1984 and 1985.
Inma Castañón, Lis Franco, Pili Neira and their team-mates were champions of Spain and international players. Karbo proved that the highest level of football in the country could be played in Galicia, yet their players still needed to study or work off the pitch.
The club folded in 1988, the very year the first national women’s league began.
Vero Boquete did manage to turn football into her profession. To do so, she had to leave Galicia, building a career that took her across the United States and through some of Europe’s top leagues.
When Deportivo re-established their women’s team in 2016, a Galician player had already won the Champions League and travelled halfway across the globe. Yet no club in the region had signed a professional contract with one of its players.
That was what changed with Tere and Raquel.
Their careers later took different paths. Teresa Abelleira earned promotion with Dépor, signed for Real Madrid, and went on to become a World Cup champion with Spain. But the milestone of 2017 does not belong to her alone.
It also bears the name of Raquel Béjar.
Galician women’s football had produced players, champion teams, and internationals for generations. Professional recognition arrived much later.
Between the money Irene González received in the 1920s and the signatures of Tere and Raquel, nearly nine decades passed.
It did not take ninety years to prove there were footballers in Galicia.
It took almost ninety for their work to be acknowledged in a professional contract.
