Spain’s Aitana Bonmatí: ‘We want the ball. Our objective is always to play’

“I was born to play football,” Aitana Bonmatí says, as much a declaration of intent as a statement of fact. There is something about her, not just the talent – although she is perhaps this European Championship tournament’s most technically gifted, elegant player, the essence of the style that defines the seleccion – but the temperament, as swiftly apparent off the pitch as on it. “I’ve got quite a bit of character,” the Spain midfielder says, laughing, and it shows. There’s a directness, a conviction, a single-mindedness that helps to explain how she got here and why she will not stop here, a determination to be who she is.

She might not have been Aitana Bonmatí at all, which may partly explain it too. Aitana’s parents, Rosa and Vicent, are teachers of Catalan language and literature whose fight to give their daughter Rosa’s surname first forced a change in law following her birth in 1998 – a gesture of equality that opened opportunity for others and symbolises how they shaped her. “I see myself reflected in them. They’re an example: my human values are theirs,” she says. “A lot of what I am today is thanks to them.” Not quite all of it, though. “I’m the only child and it wasn’t a footballing family.”

If their influence includes a clear social conscience and a fascination with reading and history – Aitana talks about Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and Heather Dune Macadam’s The Nine Hundred, about visiting Sachsenhausen concentration camp – it did not include football, not at first.

There was piano, guitar, English lessons but Aitana wanted to play football. She had to fight – sometimes quite literally, she says – but started at school in Sant Pere de Ribas. Her idol was Xavi