🇪🇸Alexia
Putellas

She was seven years old when her father died suddenly of a heart attack. Alexia Putellas has spoken about this loss many times in interviews — not as an explanation of her drive but as the foundational fact of a childhood that shaped her relationship with football as something more than recreation. She had already started playing at FC Barcelona's youth academy, and after her father's death football became the structure around which everything else organised itself. She has described it as the place where she felt most like herself, the activity that made the world legible when it was otherwise not. By the time she was a teenager at Barcelona's youth setup, the coaches around her were saying the same thing: she was exceptional, and her exceptionality was rooted not just in talent but in the kind of application that only comes from someone who genuinely needs the thing they are working at.

Alexia Putellas Segura was born on February 4, 1994, in Mollet del Vallès, a town in the Vallès Oriental comarca of Catalonia, just north of Barcelona. She joined FC Barcelona's La Masia academy — the same institution that produced Xavi, Iniesta, and Messi on the men's side — before moving to Espanyol and then Levante as a teenager, returning to Barcelona in 2012, where she has remained ever since, becoming the club's captain and the defining player of what has become one of the greatest runs of sustained dominance in the history of club football in any gender. Under coach Lluís Cortés and then Jonatan Giráldez, Barcelona won Liga F titles in consecutive seasons, reached multiple UEFA Women's Champions League finals, and created a style of play — possession-based, technically precise, high-pressing, built around positional superiority — that became the template for the best women's club football in the world.

Putellas won the Ballon d'Or Féminin in 2021 — the second woman ever to receive the award, following Ada Hegerberg's inaugural win in 2018 — and retained it in 2022, becoming the first repeat winner of the women's prize. The 2021 award was broadly uncontroversial: she had been the single most important player in the most dominant team in women's club football for two consecutive years, scoring and creating at extraordinary rates from an advanced midfield position that combined the technical requirements of a classic playmaker with the goal-scoring output of a forward. She is not primarily a goalscorer in the narrow sense — she operates deeper than that, organising her team's rhythm and finding gaps in defensive structures — but she finishes when she is called upon, with a left foot of sufficient quality to convert chances across a wide variety of situations.

In July 2022, before the UEFA Women's Euro 2022 tournament, Putellas suffered a tear to her anterior cruciate ligament while training with the Spanish national team. She missed the entire tournament, during which Spain were eliminated in the quarter-finals. The injury kept her out of football for the better part of a year. Her rehabilitation — rigorous, disciplined, and conducted with the same focused intelligence that characterises her play — produced a return that was, by any reasonable measure, astonishing: she won the Ballon d'Or for the second time while still in the process of recovering, having done enough before the injury to secure the award. She returned to action for Barcelona and contributed to the club's run to the 2023 UEFA Women's Champions League final. And then, at the 2023 Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, playing in a Spain side that had been fractured by a players' revolt against the federation's management, she helped lead her country to the first Women's World Cup triumph in their history, lifting the trophy in Sydney after a victory over England.

The 2023 World Cup was complicated in ways that go beyond football. A group of fifteen Spanish players had collectively refused to be called up for international duty in protest at the management style of coach Jorge Vilda — Putellas was not among the fifteen who publicly refused, but she had her own complex relationship with the federation's governance. The tournament was then overshadowed by the Spanish Football Federation president's forced kiss of a female player at the trophy ceremony, which provoked international outrage and ultimately led to his resignation. Spain's players, Putellas included, subsequently refused to play for the national team under Vilda, who was eventually replaced. The football itself — tactically sophisticated, collectively executed, and anchored by players of genuine world-class quality — was the best Spain had ever produced at a Women's World Cup. Putellas was its heartbeat.

Her significance to women's football in Spain and beyond is both athletic and political. She has consistently used her platform to advocate for better working conditions, proper contracts, and respect for women's professional football at all levels. Her club, FC Barcelona Femení, plays its biggest matches at the Camp Nou — in April 2022 they broke the world attendance record for a women's club football match when 91,648 fans watched them play Wolfsburg in the Champions League quarter-final. That record was itself a statement about what women's football in Spain had become, and Putellas, more than anyone, was responsible for building the sporting quality that made that kind of attendance possible. She is the greatest Spanish footballer of all time, across any gender, by most measures. Spain has not produced a player of her technical refinement and competitive intelligence in either the men's or women's game for at least a generation.