Esther González is at the top of her game. The 32-year-old striker’s list of accolades – World Cup winner, three-time Liga F champion, National Women’s Soccer League champion, Copa de la Reina victor and Concacaf W Champions Cup winner – is matched by few in the sport. But as a young girl growing up in southern Spain, her path was uncertain, rife with obstacles. “As a child, I dreamed of what I wanted to be when I grew up,” she says. “It was a soccer player. But, let’s say, circumstances didn’t allow me to see women’s soccer or anything close to women’s soccer.”
As she grew up with three sisters, González’s earliest memories of football were playing with her hermanas in their small village in Andalusia. She dreamed of being a footballer, but there wasn’t a path before her. The shy young talent with a nose for goals would play with the local boys: they needed a goalscorer and she stepped in. As González grew, her father took her on car journeys of more than four hours each way to get to training.
Two more goals followed for Spain in the Nations League, but González is not resting on her laurels. “I hope I’m not in my best moment. I hope to have better moments, that the best is yet to come.”
Ambitious, focused, invigorated by hard-earned achievements – just like her national team. After winning their first World Cup in 2023 and enduring the fallout from the Rubiales scandal, Spain’s confidence in major tournaments has improved on 2022, when La Roja lost 2-1 to England in the quarter-finals (their goal scored by González). “In order to create things you have to first believe that you can achieve them,” she says. “As a team, we believe we can achieve everything.”
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Of the Euros, where Spain share a competitive group with Italy, Belgium and Portugal, she adds: “It will be difficult, tough, there will be times when we’re tired, when there’s also a lot of travelling involved, but to achieve things, you have to believe that you can achieve them. And so I believe and work to make that happen.”
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