The story of how Spain got their captain, the daughter of wheelchair-using athletes who broke barriers and inspire her daily, begins in a bar. One night, when she was seven years old, the phone rang at Irene Guerrero’s house. It was 11.30pm, there was school the next morning and she was ready for bed but her dad was on the line.
Out with friends in Seville’s Los Carteros neighbourhood, Jesús had come across someone he wanted her to meet. Twenty-six years old now, the scene still makes her smile: “He said: ‘Bichito, my little bug, come down to the bar.’ It was late but my mum said: ‘Go on, there will be a good reason,’ so I changed out of my pyjamas and went.”
A good reason turned out to be the best. Down in the bar was Rafa Gordillo, a close friend of the owner and probably the best player Real Betis had ever had, spending 12 seasons in two spells at the club between 1976 and 1995, socks down around his ankles, but this wasn’t about him; it was about her.
“I was a big Betis fan, like my dad, but I was only seven, he was from a different era, I didn’t know him,” Guerrero says. “I remember he said: ‘Good evening, I’m Rafa Gordillo.’ And I shook his hand and said: ‘Good evening, I’m Irene Guerrero.’ And everyone started laughing.
“He said: ‘They tell me you play football, that you’re really good.’ Someone in the bar had been talking about Jesús’s daughter, the footballer. When I was little, I would take a ball everywhere. I would go with my brother to training and games, and kick about on the pitch alongside.
“Everyone knew me in the neighbourhood, but I didn’t have a team. There wasn’t one. There weren’t the opportunities for girls there are now. And that night Gordillo said: ‘Look, I have a football school. Come along tomorrow. I’d like to invite you.’”
“Seeing how excited I was, my mum had no choice but to take me. I was so nervous, I could hardly get out the car: seeing all those kids, not knowing how I would fit in, how I would play.”
The answer was: seriously well. Something special was starting. Guerrero recalls asking a teacher not to tell her mum she was playing football until one day that teacher instead told her this girl was so enthusiastic, so talented, that she had to play football, and down in the bar they weren’t wrong.
At Gordillo’s football school, they saw. “The way they took me in was wonderful,” she says. “I was so happy. It was two lovely years. But there’s a point where you can’t play official games. Rafael said: ‘We’re going to have to find a girls’ team so you can compete.’”
First there was Club Deportivo Híspalis, then Azahar, then Sevilla. “Betis didn’t have a team,” Guerrero says. As soon as they set one up, she joined. As she puts it: although Sevilla meant the chance to play in the first division, how could she not? “Sevilla were very good about it. It was not as professionalised then, they understood and I was honest with them, grateful.”
She spent eight years at Betis, taking them up, two at Levante and is now at Atlético Madrid. An international since 2019, analytical, determined, warm, two decades after that night in the bar she is Spain’s World Cup captain.
If Gordillo was an idol, Joaquín was more Guerrero’s generation and she talks about learning lessons from the basketball player Kobe Bryant, but the greatest inspiration was at home. Both wheelchair users, her father and her mother, Ana, handed her responsibility young, a culture and mindset too.
They supported her unfailingly, attending every game, Guerrero describing a single word from them, just a look from the side of the pitch, as sufficient to lift a weight from her. “What I am today is thanks to them,” she says. “Sport as a way of life was a philosophy for them.”
Her parents swam and played basketball competitively. Jesús, who contracted polio at the age of two, was national champion in the 50m backstroke, won silver in breaststroke and bronze in freestyle, then represented Spain in basketball at the 1980 Paralympics in Arnhem, the Netherlands. In November 2019, he died aged 63 due to cancer.
Guerrero was with the Spain team at Las Rozas preparing to travel to Poland when she was called to the hospital; Jesús had wanted her to stay, to chase her dream. “The way my mum and dad lived their lives every day was an example,” she says.
“They lived with limits but always said that the limits are the ones we impose on ourselves: they are in our minds. Our bodies break through those limits, those barriers. The way they took on life marks me. On the pitch too: if you work, if you fight daily, those values will be expressed there. We’re all special, all different, all have innate qualities.
“Living what I have lived doesn’t make me better or worse, but it is who I am: it formed me day to day and I’m so grateful to my parents. I wouldn’t change the slightest thing, wouldn’t swap what I lived for anything lived by anyone else.”
Those lessons are always there, so, too, the loss and this has not been an easy year: a new club, a new city, a new role for Atlético and a crisis in the national team. Last September, 15 players made themselves unavailable for selection unless changes were made, bringing a furious response from the federation, insisting they would not return unless they backed down and apologised. When the squad was named in June, only three had returned, the impact inevitable, even beyond the missing talent of the absentees.
“That’s football, life. Not everything happens in the perfect way; sometimes the context is different, not the way you would have wanted it, but it’s all something to learn from,” Guerrero says. “At Atlético, the target was a Champions League place and we didn’t manage that. We went through different phases, but we came together and were eventually able to give the fans the Copa de la Reina.”
And how. With two minutes remaining in the final, Atlético were 2-0 down to Real Madrid, but goals in the 88th minute and five minutes into added time took them to extra time after which they won on penalties. Guerrero scored their third spot kick to put them on the verge of victory, the way it played out saying something about her.
“I still can’t describe it,” she says. “At 0-2 it feels like it’s done but that refusal to give in comes out, that faith. And when we got to the shootout we believed. In those difficult moments, I try to clear my mind. There’s a word I say to myself: Mamba.”
“I was reading about Kobe Bryant,” she explains. “About how he would tell himself: ‘This is it. Cut off everything that happened until now. It’s this moment, nothing else. Focus. You don’t need to do anything other than what you have been practising for months. Don’t let luck in. You decide. You have that power. You get into your mind: I’ve done this. Every day, every session.’
“For me, the mental side of the game is vital, on and off the pitch. You have to find that balance. If the mind isn’t right the rest won’t follow. Some manage that internally, some externalise it more. In my case, I seek refuge at home, in my partner who is always there, always on the phone whatever time it is, if I need a word of support or something to make me see things differently.
“I like to think that, ultimately, changes are positive; they help you to grow, take you out of your comfort zone. At the end of the season you think: was this your best you? What’s the next target, the next challenge?”
For Spain, it is the greatest of all. Asked about the impact upon the group, how the walkout affects everything, she says: “You can imagine. It’s not easy at all but we have to live with that; the key is not to take it as something personal. Knowing how to separate the sporting side from the life off the pitch. Being able to perform, to go to our workplace and not have that on your mind. Be clear what your objectives are, the goals we have set. We have something there which unites us all: the World Cup, Spain.
“We have a thorn in our side after what happened with England [in the quarter-final] at the Euros last year but we have taken lessons from that and have been working hard all year. I like to think that the only limits are the ones we put in place ourselves. We know we have to go step by step, without getting ahead of ourselves. We want to be in that final.
“It’s a dream come true to be going to the World Cup: not just for me, but for my family and above all my dad, with whom all this started. He’s the reason I get up every morning and play football, chase my dreams. Because I know that everything I do, everything I achieve, every moment, reaches him somehow. And that’s my way of having him close to me every day.”
