Aitana Bonmatí always asks the same question. Every game Barcelona Femení plays generates a flood of performance data. The team’s fitness coaches know how far each player ran, how fast, how long. There is so much information, in fact, that they need two days to download it and tabulate it and parse it. Only then is it passed back to the squad.
Not every player pays much heed to that sort of feedback. Some disregard it entirely. Bonmatí is different. She does not just want the answer; she wants to see the work, too. More than anything, she wants to know the why.
“After some games, you feel so fatigued, so exhausted,” she said. “But the data can be low. That’s because sometimes it is not just a physical thing. It can be to do with stress, with the nerves you had. I like to talk about it with the coaches. I want to understand why these things happen.”
As far as the raw figures go, the 25-year-old Bonmatí’s season looks like this: nine goals scored, and 10 created, from midfield as Barcelona swept, yet again, to the Spanish title; five goals scored, and seven more created, in the Champions League on the way to her — and her club’s — fourth final in five years. Only Wolfsburg’s Ewa Pajor has scored more goals than Bonmatí. Nobody has more assists.
The case…
