“I’m not judging you,” Mapi León says and then she starts laughing, which she does often. “But,” the Spain and Barcelona defender continues, “the pressure comes more from the media. Sometimes, it’s as if you have to win all the time. ‘Oh, they’ll win.’ We will win? No. It seems like if we don’t, it’s a disaster, a drama. It seems easy. There’s the run with our clubs, the improvement with the national team, our [Fifa] ranking, we’re playing well, everything is super-positive but, no, it’s not so easy.”
Time, then, to let a little realism back in. In the days before Spain’s preliminary squad met at their Las Rozas HQ, the coach, Jorge Vilda, described the pressure his players were under as excessive, unreal. “The expectation has become very high, and that’s not good,” he said. “I’ve not experienced this; friends say they’ve never seen demands like these made of a national team that still hasn’t won anything. We’ve not won the Euros or the World Cup, but they have us down as champions or finalists. The pressure on the players isn’t normal.”
