Alexia Putellas: The Midfielder Who Became Barcelona
On 5 July 2022, the day before Spain opened its European Championship, Putellas tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee during a training session. She did not play again for ten months. Over that same stretch she won — or rather retained — the Ballon d'Or Féminin, the FIFA Best award and UEFA's Player of the Year, becoming the first woman to take all three in consecutive years. She collected them in a brace, having barely kicked a ball.
The Maradona of the Playground
Alèxia Putellas i Segura grew up in Mollet del Vallès, north of Barcelona, in a family of basketball people — daughter of Jaume Putellas Rota and Elisabet Segura Sabaté, older sister to Alba. She tried roller hockey, tennis and folk dance. What stuck was the Cam·p Nou, where her father took her, and the local bar called La Bolera where the family watched matches. Her idols were Andrés Iniesta, Rivaldo and Ronaldinho, plus the French midfielder Louisa Nécib; Iniesta would later return the compliment, calling her a role model who "encapsulates the values of FC Barcelona."
A Catalan account of her childhood records that at school "she played with all the boys and that she was the Maradona of the playground... because she dribbled around all of her classmates as if they were broomsticks." Her mother initially discouraged club football, which Putellas read as machismo rather than maternal caution. She joined Sabadell at seven — the family lied about her age, since the team required eight-year-olds — and captained girls older than her.
The Long Apprenticeship
One year in Barcelona's La Masia at eleven ended when the women's system was restructured and her age group vanished. Espanyol took her, and she debuted for their first team at sixteen. At seventeen she moved to Levante, then one of the few genuinely professional environments in Spanish women's football, and scored fifteen goals in thirty-four matches. Her coach Antonio Contreras decided she leaned too heavily on her left foot and rebuilt her two-footed. Because the sport could not yet pay her, she enrolled at Pompeu Fabra University in 2013 to study business administration.
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Take the IQ test →She returned to Barcelona in July 2012, weeks after her father's death. The 2013 Copa de la Reina final produced the goal that announced her: past two defenders, past the goalkeeper, MVP of the match, and Barcelona's first domestic double.
Alexia Is Barcelona
By 2014 she was described as the future of both club and country. She was renamed a midfielder in 2015 after years as a forward, took the captain's armband properly in 2018, and became the organising intelligence of the greatest club side in the women's game. In the 2021 Champions League final she played the full ninety minutes on a strapped, strained hamstring, scored a penalty and threaded the pass for Aitana Bonmatí's goal in a 4–0 win over Chelsea — the largest single-leg margin in the competition's final history. Weeks later she scored twice in the Copa final to complete a continental treble, the first by a Spanish women's team, and finished the season with twenty-six goals: the highest-scoring midfielder in Europe.
She scored the first competitive women's goal at the Camp Nou in January 2021, then scored there again in front of 91,553 and 91,648 as Barcelona twice broke the world attendance record for a women's match in 2022. Teammates settled on a formulation that season: "Barcelona is Alexia and Alexia is Barcelona."
The Fight Off the Pitch
In September 2022 she publicly backed the fifteen Spain internationals — "Las 15" — who refused to play for the national team until conditions at the federation changed. It was not an isolated stand. In 2015, after Spain's first World Cup ended in two defeats and a draw, she was among the squad demanding the resignation of long-serving coach Ignacio Quereda over preparation and lost confidence. Two years earlier she had argued that "stereotypes in society prevented the Spain women's team from seeing the same success as the men's, despite having the same technical quality."
Why Alexia Is Called a Genius
Her genius claim is the rarer kind: it rests on judgement rather than physique. She is not the quickest or strongest player in her generation of Barcelona midfielders; what she has is an unusually complete map of where the ball should go next, and the technique to send it there with either foot — a two-footedness deliberately built by a coach who thought her natural left was a crutch. The evidence is in the shape of her numbers. In 2021–22 she scored eighteen league goals and also led the league in assists with fifteen, which is the statistical signature of a player who both finishes and creates rather than specialising in one. She was the Champions League's top scorer that season with eleven and had the most combined goals and assists of anyone in it, from central midfield.
The institutions have used the strongest words available to them: UEFA Player of the Year, FIFA Best and Ballon d'Or in 2021, all three again in 2022, and Champions League Player of the Season in both 2021–22 and 2025–26. Iniesta — the most credible witness in Spanish football on the subject of midfield intelligence — named her a role model for the club's values.
The counter-case deserves stating. The 2022 awards were voted on a body of work she could not extend, and she spent much of the following two seasons injured, having knee surgery in December 2023 and missing four months. Her late-career goal totals owe something to being moved forward into a false nine. And she played inside the most dominant club machine women's football has produced; disentangling her judgement from Barcelona's is genuinely hard. That the club's own players could not tell the two apart is either the strongest evidence for her, or the strongest objection.
The Long Goodbye
She became Spain's record cap holder in 2021, the first Spanish woman past 100 caps in 2022, and won the 2023 World Cup and the 2023–24 Nations League. At Barcelona she finished with 232 goals — second only to Lionel Messi in the club's combined history — and 508 appearances, behind only Melanie Serrano. She captained the side to a 4–0 Champions League final win over Lyon on 23 May 2026, was named the competition's player of the season the next day, announced her departure three days later, and assisted a goal in her final match. She was the first Spaniard to win a world player award since Luis Suárez in 1960; she made it look, in retrospect, overdue.
