The women’s First Division, also called League F, will make Extremadura boast several elite soccer players this year. The most ‘veteran’ will be Carmen Menayo who will play one more season for Atlético de Madrid, a team in which the young woman’s debut is also expected. Alba Zafra. Villarreal also has two Extremadurans in its ranks, Estefa y Belen Martinezwhile the promising one is alone in Sevilla Ana Franco. But it is in the ranks of the Alhama ElPozo where the people from Dombenites have a countrywoman, Raquel Morcillo, who will share a dressing room with the Extremadura native as well. Father Hidalgoa native of Villanueva de la Serena and with whom he coincided a few years ago in La Cruz Villanovense, then in the Second Division.
The Murcian team, recently promoted to First Division, will thus have a pumpkin accent in this special debut. “It was an opportunity that I couldn’t miss,” acknowledges Raquel Morcillo, who thus once again enjoys a category that she barely tasted with the Zaragoza reserve team, making her debut with the first team, although it will be her first time with a record in this F League. .
Raquel Morcillo (Don Benito, 1999) does not hide her pride in the presence of Extremadurans in the category. “Hopefully we will increase the number and every day we will be more,” he says about a sport that continues to boom, “we hope that this does not stop adding up, that every day more people get hooked and that it also takes away some of the myths out of their heads so they can enjoy women’s football.
The Dombeni native is one of the soccer players who has managed to make this sport her profession and recognizes that she currently makes a living from soccer thanks to the recently signed agreement. “We can never compare it with the men’s game, but thank God we can at least survive and focus only on football.” She does it in a small Murcian town of which she highlights its tranquility, but also the heat in these last rushes of summer.
the beginning
However, the road taken to achieve this has also been long after leaving La Cruz Villanovense at the age of 17 to head to Zaragoza, then to Aldaia in Valencia and, finally, to Granada where he has played the last three seasons in the Second Federation. “If we look back, I have achieved a lot of things, now it is easier for a girl to play football because there are categories from Benjamin,” he remembers, “I started playing with the boys up to cadets and then I was able to be on a team.” female”.
The sport advances at the same time as a society normalizes a situation that should never have been a rarity: watching a girl play soccer. “Now they give you the ease of being on a women’s team and it is better seen that you play, it is not like before when you were ‘the strange girl who plays soccer’,” says Raquel Morcillo, who had to live with this situation years ago. , «because in the end you are a girl and you see that only boys play football; But you adapt because if it’s what you want, what others say doesn’t matter to you.
A time when it was difficult to have an Alexia Putellas to be inspired by, “my references were all male footballers.” But today, at 23 years old, he does look with emotion at Alexia herself or the veteran Jenni Hermoso, two players for whom he has absolute predilection. Like them, Raquel Morcillo has fulfilled a dream for which she feels “very lucky” and which she wants to enjoy one more season, this time, in the elite.