After completing a perfect 2023/24 season with Barcelona FC, Spain midfielder Aitana Bonmatí won her second-straight Ballon d’Or award on Monday.
"I always say this is not something that you can do alone," the 26-year-old said, crediting her teammates in her acceptance speech. "I'm so lucky to be surrounded by wonderful players who help me to keep growing into a better player."
Only one other women's footballer has won the award twice: Bonmatí's teammate for club and country, Alexia Putellas, who clocked in 10th in this year's final tally. The two now hold a combined four-year streak in winning soccer's top honor.
The only other recipients in the award's six-year history are USWNT star Megan Rapinoe and Norway's Ada Hegerberg.
It's Barcelona or bust at Ballon d'Or
Barcelona’s 2024 triumphs — winning a historic quadruple of Liga F, Champions League, Supercopa, and Copa de la Reina titles — earned the team Club of the Year honors last night.
That success was mirrored on the individual level, as well. Barça players owned the award's Top 3 spots, with forwards Caroline Graham Hansen and Salma Paralluelo just behind Bonmatí in the final vote.
Olympic gold earns USWNT stalwarts votes
Of the five USWNT players on the Ballon d'Or's 30-athlete shortlist, four landed in the Top 10, buoyed by their gold medal performance at the 2024 Paris Games. USWNT captain Lindsey Horan finished at No. 5 alongside the "Triple Espresso" strike squad of No. 4 Sophia Smith, No. 6 Mal Swanson, and No. 9 Trinity Rodman.
The lone goalkeeper on the list, USWNT star Alyssa Naeher, came in at No. 17. The Ballon d'Or does not include a separate individual award for women's football's top goalkeeper.
Meanwhile, USWNT boss Emma Hayes brought home historic hardware of her own.
After leading Chelsea FC to a fifth-straight WSL title before winning Olympic gold with the USWNT, Hayes received the first-ever Women’s Coach of the Year award last night.
"I just want to say a big thank you to all the staff and players from both teams," Hayes said after receiving the inaugural honor.
"Football is a team game and I’m very grateful to have led some amazing teams this year, so this award is for everyone who has been a part of the US team and Chelsea."
Hermoso's advocacy honored
Former Barcelona forward and Spanish national Jenni Hermoso — who now plays for Tigres in Mexico's Liga MX — became the third person and first woman to win the humanitarian Socrates Award in last night's ceremony.
The award recognizes Hermoso's efforts advocating for the advancement of the women's game, equality at all levels of soccer, and her fight against sexual harassment in sports ignited by the nonconsensual kiss from ex-Spanish federation president Luis Rubiales during the 2023 World Cup trophy ceremony.
"Women's football deserves a place for new and future generations," the 34-year-old urged in her speech before imploring further action from the global soccer community.
"I'd like to ask all of you to get together and work together in order to make a better world possible and to make football become what little girls deserve for the future."
Ballon d'Or ceremony spurs conversation about persisting inequities
While the Ballon d'Or has made strides by instituting a women's football award in 2018, the ceremony continues to be fall during a FIFA women's international window. The scheduling makes it near-impossible for many women's football nominees to attend what is arguably the sport's biggest night.
Last night, only a handful of European-based players were able to make the Paris event.
Even more, the Ballon d'Or ballot only honors one individual woman footballer, while the men's night bestows three additional trophies: the Yashin for best goalkeeper, the Gerd Müller for top goalscorer, and the Kopa for best U-21 player. Plus, while 100 journalists vote for the final men's tally, only 50 are tapped to weigh in on the women's award.
Spanning 72 teams from 50 European leagues, the deepest Champions League tournament in UEFA history starts tomorrow with clubs from the UK to Georgia eyeing Lisbon's late-May final.
Four teams gained automatic entry to October's 16-team group stage — defending UEFA champs FC Barcelona and runners-up Lyon, plus top German finishers FC Bayern and WSL title-holders Chelsea — with this month's qualifiers determining the remaining 12.
The road to the Champions League group stage
There are two qualifying rounds played concurrently between two sets of teams: The champions path matches up winners from each non-automatically qualified league, while the league path does the same with second- and third-place finishers.
Each path opens with a series of four-team, single-elimination mini-tournaments, in which 59 clubs will enter Wednesday's semifinals with just 15 moving on from Saturday's finals.
Those 15 will join runners-up from top leagues France, Germany, Spain, England, Italy, and Sweden for Round 2 later this month, all vying for a spot in group stage play.
Top European clubs battle for Champions League glory
Set to square off against Denmark's FC Nordsjælland tomorrow, Portuguese powerhouse SL Benfica has made the group stage every year since the 2021-22 season.
WSL favorites Arsenal saw their 16-season UWCL quarterfinal streak snapped by Paris FC last year, so they'll be hungry for redemption when they face Scotland’s Rangers FC tomorrow. If victorious, they'll be set to face the winner of tomorrow's match between 2024 Women's Cup runners-up Atlético de Madrid and Norway's Rosenborg on Saturday.
Also brewing tomorrow is a battle of the underdogs between Finnish side KuPS Kuopio and Scottish third-place finishers Celtic.
How to watch UEFA Champions League matches
Champions League action kicks off tomorrow at 5 AM ET, with live streaming coverage exclusively on DAZN.
International Soccer Summer isn’t over quite yet, with Bay FC hosting FC Barcelona tonight in the first of the storied Spanish side's two-match US friendly tour.
The reigning European champions will round out their trip against the just-launched USL Super League's Dallas Trinity DC in Texas on Friday.
NWSL expansion team Bay FC no stranger to bold moves
Inviting a club of Barça’s caliber for a midseason friendly is just the latest in a series of bold moves by the new NWSL franchise. The club has been all-in from the start, one-upping a record-setting expansion fee to bring the NWSL to the Bay Area before shelling out a world-record transfer fee for Zambian forward Rachael Kundananji in February.
At 10th-place in the standings with nine matches left, Bay FC is within striking distance of the NWSL's eight-team postseason cutoff. If they can close that gap, they'll become just the second expansion team to make the playoffs in their first season.
Ex-Barcelona standout Oshoala faces her former club
Tonight's match will likely feature Nigerian striker Asisat Oshoala, who joined Bay FC in February after five seasons with Barcelona. The six-time African Player of the Year helped the Spanish club to four Liga F trophies and two Champions League titles. She remains their fourth all-time leading scorer with 117 goals in 162 appearances.
When asked about playing her old team, Oshoala told reporters, "It will be weird. I hope I don’t pass it to the wrong team thinking this is my teammate. But it will be fun, I’m excited they will be here."
How to watch Bay FC play Barcelona on Thursday
Catch the international club friendly between Bay FC and Barcelona tonight at 10 PM ET, with live streaming coverage on ESPN+.
Five months after announcing that the Washington Spirit had hired Barcelona Femení coach Jonatan Giráldez as the team's new head coach, Giráldez has joined the club in Washington, DC.
Giráldez is coming off of a successful season with the Spanish side, having won UEFA Women's Champions League, Copa de la Reina, Supercopa, and Liga F in his final season to complete a lauded Quadruple.
While Giráldez was finishing out his tenure in Europe, Adrián González filled in as Spirit interim head coach. González has also seen success, leading the team to its third-place standing with a 9-3-1 record through 13 games.
“I’m thrilled to join the Spirit and begin this next chapter with the club,” Giráldez said in an official team statement. “To be part of the vision Michele Kang has for the Spirit and women’s soccer globally is an exciting opportunity.”
Giráldez has worked at Barcelona since 2019, initially coming on as an assistant coach before moving up to head coach in 2021. The team went 30-0-0 on the season under Giráldez during his first year as manager.
He brings along with him Andrés González and Toni Gordo, who will serve as the Spirit's Fitness Coach and Club Analyst, respectively.
FC Barcelona forward Asisat Oshoala is joining the NWSL, signing with expansion side Bay FC through 2026 with an option for 2027. A proven winner, she brings a knack for goalscoring and the ability to connect with her playmakers that creates a more complete attack for the club.
“She brings a top-class mentality to the field combined with pace and technical ability that allows her to lead the line, while also giving those players around her the license to be creative and thrive in space,” Bay FC general manager Lucy Rushton said in a team statement.
With Bay FC already in preseason, Oshoala has wasted no time arriving in camp, and is settling in with her new club in Santa Barbara. The move presents a new leap of faith for the 29-year-old, who has never shied away from pursuing new challenges.
“I’ve stayed a long time in Europe, it’s the longest I’ve stayed anywhere,” she tells Just Women’s Sports prior to Thursday’s announcement. “I’ve played in different continents and all that, and I just feel like I would love to try elsewhere maybe one more time, one more change to see how that feels.”
Fans in the U.S. might know Oshoala from Nigeria’s scintillating run at the 2023 World Cup, or perhaps as the first African woman to win the Champions League with Barcelona in 2021. She’s had multiple record seasons with the Spanish champions, most notably tying for first in scoring in Liga F in 2021/22. But even before she found a home in Barcelona, she’s always had the mindset that change is a positive, and diversity of experience is a strength.
After getting her professional start in Nigeria as a teenager, Oshoala transferred to Liverpool in the WSL when she was just 20 years old. After a stint at Arsenal, she transferred to the Chinese club Dalian, winning the golden boot and two league championships there.
She went into her experience in China completely blind to the footballing culture, but came out of her time there a more well-rounded player with valuable experience. “I was just willing to take the risk, and I totally loved it,” she says.
It’s with a similarly open mind that she met with Bay FC head coach Albertin Montoya, who presented to her a new experience that she felt she could get excited about. “I feel like everyone wants to be a part of something beautiful, something amazing,” she says.
“The project that this club is trying to build is really on the high side, the challenge is also it’s more or less a risk for me … because of where I’m coming from, the style of football, the environment and everything. It’s a big change, it’s a huge change for me, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take as well.”
“If you don’t leave your comfort zone, sometimes you don’t get to achieve certain things,” she continues. “It’s very important to understand this, and at this point in my career, I won’t think I’m really scared to make big changes.”
The comfort zone (and winning culture) of Barcelona doesn’t seem to be waning anytime soon, something that Oshoala admits gave her pause when she was considering her options for the future. She’s won basically every possible trophy with the club, and she leaves mid-season with Barcelona poised for even more success. She considered putting her decision off for a little while.
“It was hard,” she says. “Walking away from that was difficult. Where can I go from that — you just don’t know where you can be that can actually be better than where you are at the moment.”
But then the questions she asked herself became more personal, outside of winning soccer games. “Sometimes you have to tell yourself, okay, apart from trophies, what do you have currently, what else is there for you?” she says. “These are the questions I asked myself, these are the questions I had deep conversations with my family.”
Oshoala brings up the Asisat Oshoala Academy, and the girls there who want to follow in her footsteps towards professional footballing careers. She hopes that her move to the NWSL shows young players in Nigeria that a number of different continents could be in their future.
“You want to think about the younger generations coming up,” she says. “You want to think about the African players who can actually get more opportunities to come into this league. You want to encourage these girls to also come here as well.”
As for what awaits her on the field, Oshoala is still in the early stages of acclimating to Bay FC’s style of play, but even in initial meetings with coaching staff she felt she understood a clear vision. “Albertin is a very professional person, he is funny, can be funny as well,” she says with a laugh.
“He’s a person who knows what he wants, and how he wants to play,” she continues. “And I actually like that he wants to keep the ball. They want to play a different style of football compared to what the league is actually used to and all of that. I just feel like I want to be a part of something like that from the scratches, where I don’t mind the risk behind it.”
Her signing represents the promise of a larger sea change in the NWSL, where top coaching talents (like Oshoala’s Barcelona manager Jonatan Giráldez) are eager to usher in a new era of tactical nuance that retains the league’s competitiveness while sharpening technicality. Possession-style football has at times been easier to discuss than actually implement in the NWSL, but 2024 could see more clubs than ever trying to marry a more technical style with the league’s established speed of play.
Oshoala is coming in without many pre-formed opinions on the NWSL’s style. “I never had the interest to play in America, to be honest with you,” she says. “I used to say that — not because I don’t like the league or something — I usually don’t really follow like that because of the time difference. I was never so interested or invested in it, but recently my mind changed. I saw a couple of players here, you know, and then I started following them because I’ve got friends as well who play here.”
She now sees playing in front of American crowds to be an opportunity for brand-building, and she’s clear that she both wants and expects Bay FC to contend for a playoff spot in their first year.
“I’m not going to expect the same level of performance from my teammates compared to that of where I’m coming from,” she says. “But I’m ready to kind of go for it. I’m ready to fight for them, fight for each other, go out there, have each other’s back and tell ourselves it’s our first year and we really want to reach the playoffs.”
“You want everyone to feel like we’re not going to be an easy team to play. If you’re gonna get a point off of us, you can work for it.”
Off the field, Oshoala is happy that despite moving continents, she will still be near water, where she likes to go be by herself and switch off from football. On the field, the work begins to create a cohesive unit out of a newly-put-together expansion side.
“I feel like I’ve been there before, I’ve done that before and know how it turned out,” she says. “It’s not gonna be something easy, but it’s something that is achievable. And I’m a person who will just go for what I want. If I like it, I want to do it.”