Super Cup celebration boosts growth of women's football in Saudi Arabia
Spanish trainers and coaches working in the Asian country testify to the progress of the women's game in recent years.
In the same King Abdullah Sports City in Jeddah, where FC Barcelona beat Real Madrid in the final of the Spanish Super Cup on Sunday, several girls’ teams are put through their paces every day on the training fields in front of the Al Jawhara stadium, the venue for the match.
Leading the session is Spanish coach Ana Ecube, Head Technical Supervisor for the Saudi Arabian Football Federation, who has witnessed first-hand how ‘during the four years that we have been working on this project that started in Riyadh, we have reached the target of training up to two hundred girls between the ages of six and twelve. We have seen exponential growth that I am very surprised and happy about because of the resources that Saudi Arabia and its football federation provide’.
Since the arrival of the Spanish Super Cup in the Asian country in 2020, the boost given to women's football is manifested from the grassroots ‘with training, analysis, methodology and physical training for coaches as well as top facilities and equipment for the players. Saudi Arabia's commitment to women's football is total’, as Ecube herself acknowledges.
A strategic plan that reaches from the youth to the professional level, as the Asian country has created during this decade a professional women's football league with ten teams in which all matches are televised live, which in turn leading into the increase in the number of coaching licenses at the grassroots level.
Thus, this Super Cup has left us with images such as the young Saudi footballers accompanying the players of the teams participating in the Super Cup during the build-up to the matches, while exchanges and training courses offered by the RFEF for coaches from this country have led to activities such as those carried out this past November at the Ciudad del Fútbol in Las Rozas.
At the head of the Saudi women's national team is also a Spaniard, Lluís Cortés, European champion with FC Barcelona, who has led the Saudi national team to its best ever FIFA ranking.
For Cortés, ‘all these changes in recent years are not limited to football, but to the very role of women in society, who until recently could not engage in physical activities and today compete, earn a living from football and appear on television, inspiring girls who also want to play this sport’.
A decisive boost in all areas for the growth of women's football that the Spanish Super Cup, along with numerous other RFEF initiatives in the area, will help to bring about, in the words of the Saudi coach himself, ‘something very nice, as it is a change both on a footballing and social level’.