May 22, (THEWILL) – The iconic “Invincibles” of North London, Arsenal Football Club, have been celebrated for the unprecedented feat they accomplished in the 2003/2004 season, when they inarguably earned for themselves the right of being considered the greatest English Premier League team to have played in England’s top flight. Even if a Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United-coached side won the league more times than any other club and Pep Guardiola’s 2017/2018 Manchester City squad was able to set a new record for the most points obtained in a single campaign, none of these great sides and their equally great managers could boast, like Arsenal, going the entire season without tasting defeat.
As a result, the Gunners have been extolled every season ever since with fans going overboard to remind everybody of what the club accomplished in that momentous 2003/2004 campaign. Every other team with title credentials have also striven to replicate that record without much success. There have also been some other unbeaten records in the United Kingdom, such as Steven Gerrard was able to accomplish with the Glasgow Rangers in the 2020/2021 season to match their arch-rivals’ Celtic’s unbeaten run in the 2016/2017 campaign with Brendan Rodgers. Yet, all of these pale into insignificance when compared to the feat of the current squad of Barcelona Femini.
The all-conquering female team of Barcelona Football Club ran an overwhelmingly dominating campaign this season with an enviable goals record (159 in their unprecedented perfect League run), wins (the most of any side in Spain by a long shot), stadium attendance (not once but twice in one European football season) and still are on track to defend their UEFA Women’s Champions League title against another fantastic European female side, Olympique Lyonnais in Turin, the capital city of Piedmont in northern Italy, on May 21. With Nigeria’s own Asisat Oshoala finishing at the top of the scorers chart in the Primera Iberdrola despite a three-month injury layoff, it is small wonder why this class of Barca players is being considered the generation to elevate the status of the female game in Europe and beyond.
Yet, their overarching dominance in Spain and across Europe has evoked concerned questions about the contemporary nature of women’s football with the debate around the question of whether Barca are simply heads and shoulders above the rest of the field in terms of quality or if the quality of women’s football as a whole still leaves a lot to be desired.
A breakdown of the feats that Barcelona achieved in this triumphant season reads like a litany of excellence. As already mentioned, Barca defended their Primera Iberdrola title with the perfect 30 wins out of 30 games played, they accomplished that with 159 goals while conceding just 11 for an incredible goal difference of 148. The ladies averaged 5.30 goals per game with their biggest win coming away from home when they beat Sevilla 10-1 at the Jesús Navas Stadium. Also, they had a conceding average of just 0.36 per match.
Behind Oshoala’s highest-scoring record was Best FIFA Footballer of the Year, Alexia Putellas, who finished second with 18 goals. She also provided another astounding 15 assists for a goal contribution total of 33. On the other hand, Oshoala ended the season with 23 goals and three assists, which makes hers 10 fewer than that of Putellas. However, the team was nigh impossible to keep from scoring with as many as 20 different players getting on the Barca women’s scoresheet during the prolific season.
While they dominated in every statistics, the very strenuous demands of the game took its toll on the players. They had their fair share of injuries, which forced several first-choice players to be sidelined for different lengths of time, with Oshoala one of those twice affected. In all, coach Jonathan Giráldez had to apply tactical nous, in his debut season as the Barca Femini manager, to see that they successfully defended their title and did not slip, as they disappointedly did in the previous season, and hold tenaciously to their winning streak to the very end. He did this while juggling players in different positions to cater for injuries such that, at the end of the season, Barça Women used no less than 31 different players in the league.
The exploits of the Catalan women began to earn them some of the recognition they deserve as they progressed impressively this season. It was particularly noteworthy as they drew attention to the rise in the status of female football. One way this happened was the record record-setting number of fans their matches drew to the stands. A record of 90,185 fans turned up to witness the 1999 World Cup final between the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) take on the China Women’s team and the record stood untouched until March 30 this year when Barca Femini clashed with Real Madrid’s Women’s team while a record crowd of 91,553 fans cheered them on. In less than a month, precisely 23 days later, Barca was to break the record that had appeared impossible to supercede. Some 91,648 fans turned up to see Barca’s UWCL semi-final first leg against Wolfsburg on Friday, further pushing the envelope of world attendance record for women’s football.
It is worth reckoning with that Oshoala and her teammates have become a reference point in the golden history of the women’s game as what seemed an impossible task has been achieved. With esteemed female players like Putellas, who is both the Best FIFA women’s footballer of the year and the Ballon d’Or winner, and Oshoala, who won the Pichichi Award for this year and was congratulated by FIFA Women’s World cup body, the Barca team is reaching into the type of hype and following that has made the men’s game the global phenomenon that it currently is. The feat of 30 wins in 30 games is a testament to this drive and will be talked about for a long time to come as the record that caught the attention of the world.
There have obviously been female teams that have gone through a season without dropping points. In 1998 Asker of Norway went through the season winning all 18 of their matches. There have been others such as FC PAOK Thessaloniki, which won all 24 of their games in the 2010/2011 season as did French side Lyon in the 2014/2015 season for all 18 matches. Others are: NSA Sofia of Bulgaria (20 matches, 2017/2018), PAOK again in 2018/2019, Zhytlobud-1 Kharkiv of Ukraine (18 matches, 2018/2019), Sofia again in the 2018/2019 season, Lithuania’s Gintra Universitetas (20 matches, 2020), Sofia (3rd time, 26 matches 2020/2021), Albania’s Vllaznia (22 matches, 2020/2021) and in the same year, Italy’s Juventus (22 matches). Yet, none were competing against 16 other teams and could not have reached Barca’s outstanding 30-win perfect record.
It is a daring feat. It is remarkable in and of itself that they could have achieved it in the previous season but were short by one victory only, which marred their run of a treble of trophies: Primera Ibedrola, Copa del Rey and the UWCL. It is inconceivable to think they will be denied another treble this season as they are on course to maintain their reputation as one of the greatest female sides in contemporary football. As they keep the extremely high standards they have set for themselves the process of elevating female football to bring it to the level of the game in the men’s category. The equal pay granted men’s and women’s footballers in the US is a step in that direction. Barca Femini will be playing their role in making this a standard as they continue to dominate the game in every competition they play in. One can only feel for their opponents.
About the Author
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
