Some films are like snow globes. You shake them, and a whole world drifts down in flakes, frozen in its era, with its prohibitions, its silences and its motionless Sundays. Pioneras has that quality of a time capsule, but this one has a crack in it and that is where today’s air rushes in.
No Need to Love Football
Let’s say it right away, to reassure anyone who can’t tell an offside from a corner: you can understand nothing about football and still be swept off your feet. The ball here is a pretext, in the noblest sense. What is at stake on the pitch is first at stake elsewhere: in kitchens, in the concierge’s lodge, on the benches of Catholic school, in newsrooms where women have no name.
These players don’t have the luxury of being only players.
Nati (Sofía de Iznájar), a gifted, tight-lipped prodigy, has to rush home to look after her siblings while her mother,
Matilde (Carmen Ruíz), a widowed concierge, holds the household together with her bare hands.
Belén (Bruna Lucadamo), the team’s sunny leader, is lucky enough to have a father who backs her, and the rivalry between the two girls says on the pitch everything their lives don’t have in common.
Every training session is stolen from something: a family, a job, a reputation. For them, football is never a pastime. It is an hour of freedom wrested from everything else. That is what makes the birth of this team so moving: we are not watching athletes get ready, we are watching women make room for themselves.
The Legacy of Francoism
The film is set in Villaverde, a working-class district in the south of Madrid, in a Spain where the regime is growing old without loosening its grip. The dictatorship doesn’t need to march across the screen. It is wherever it has seeped in: in conversations, in everyday morality, in traditions policed by a veneer of piety that decides what a young woman may do with her body and her Sunday. Power, here, lives in the neighbor’s gaze.
Here, the bubble cracks.
Faced with these remnants of Francoism so comfortably settled in people’s minds, it is hard not to think of the normalization of the far right, which, half a century later, is pulling up a chair at Europe’s table as if nothing had happened.
The film doesn’t need to spell it out. Injustices, it seems to whisper, don’t disappear. They circulate, like a ball passed from one generation to the next.
Insults, From 1970 to the Present Day
When they play, the insults rain down. We recognize them. They have the same ring as the ones that bloom today beneath videos of women’s football, posted by faceless accounts that have turned masculinism into a substitute religion. The stands have changed medium, not vocabulary.
Marta Díaz de Lope Díaz knows that tune firsthand. As a child, she was the only girl playing football with the boys in the schoolyard, with the stubborn feeling, she says, of being “in a place that wasn’t meant for me.”
You can feel it in every shot: this is, in a way, the film she would have loved to see as a girl.
This clash of mentalities could have produced a thesis film. Instead it produces a sensitive film whose emotion reaches us without ever spilling over, swinging between drama and comedy with unwavering tenderness for its characters. They are beautiful, these young women, not with the beauty demanded of women, but with the kind they were denied: the beauty of effort, of stubbornness, of scraped knees.
A Coach Who Is No Saint
At the center of this team stands Javier Poga (Daniel Ibáñez), a young organizer with a used-car salesman’s patter, inspired by Rafael Muga, the first coach of Spain’s women’s team. He could have been turned into a savior. The film is smart enough to make him a man: sincere in his commitment, thrilled by the taste of the forbidden, and not entirely indifferent to the idea of his name ending up in the history books.
His bursts of enthusiasm, his doubts and his small defeats carry the melancholy of an elegy. He is like those coaches who yell from the bench because they don’t know any other way of saying they believe.
Beside him, another figure deserves a closer look: Edelmira (Aixa Villagrán), a sports columnist with a large following, who has been writing under a pseudonym for years. No one suspects that one of football’s most widely read bylines belongs to a woman. She too is playing, in her own way, on a team that doesn’t exist yet.
Clearing the Way
In 2023, Spain became women’s football world champion. The film doesn’t brandish the trophy; it makes it a horizon line. What interests it are the women who marked out the pitch before anyone agreed to paint lines on it.
What becomes of this team and how that first match ends, the film will let you discover.
You walk out wanting to salute every girl who was ever told it wasn’t for her, and with a slight unease, as you switch your phone back on, at noticing that some people still tell them so.
They were the first.
They won’t be the last.
