Aitana Bonmatí always asks the same question. Every match that Barcelona Femení plays generates an avalanche of performance data. The team’s physical trainers know how much each player ran, how fast, how long. In fact, there is so much information that it takes two days to download, tabulate, and analyze it. Only then is it returned to the team.

Not all players pay much attention to that kind of feedback. Some ignore it completely. Bonmatí is different. She doesn’t just want the answer; she also wants to see the work. More than anything, she wants to know why.

“After a few games, you feel so fatigued, so drained,” he said. “But the data may be low. That’s because sometimes it’s not just a physical thing. It may have to do with stress, with the nerves you had. I like to talk about it with the coaches. I want to understand why these things happen.”

In terms of raw numbers, the 25-year-old Bonmatí’s season looks like this: nine goals scored and 10 created from midfield as Barcelona swept, once again, to the Spanish title; five goals scored, and seven more created, in the Champions League en route to their fourth final, and his club’s, in five years. Only Wolfsburg’s Ewa Pajor has scored more goals than Bonmatí. No one has more assists.

The case that Bonmatí has ​​been the most decisive and valuable player in Europe this season is compelling. There’s also plenty of evidence to suggest he should be considered the frontrunner for the Ballon d’Or, at least until the World Cup comes around.

The easiest explanation for why is one she dismisses without a second thought. It is Bonmatí, says the theory, who has established himself as the heartbeat of Barcelona in the loss due to injury to Alexia Putellas, the club’s captain. “She has taken on a lot of responsibility in midfield,” Fridolina Rolfo, Barcelona’s Swedish striker, said earlier this year. “She deserves all the attention, in my opinion.”

Bonmatí has ​​a slightly different interpretation. “The coach is the boss,” he said. This season, that coach, Jonatan Giráldez, has asked him to play a more advanced role than in previous years, not only to alleviate the absence of Putellas but also because the presence of Patri Guijarro, Ingrid Engen and Keira Walsh makes the club feel good. – packed with defensive midfielders. “The role has changed,” Bonmatí said. “But not because of me.”

Replacing Putellas, he said, has been a collective effort. “The media is always trying to find someone on the team to focus on, and now this year it’s me,” she said. “But I have had good seasons in recent years. I’m ambitious. I just want to be better, more complete than last year”.

Standing out at Barcelona is more complex than it seems. Lucy Bronze, the English defender who moved to Catalonia last summer, perhaps got it best. In Barcelona, ​​she said earlier this year, she has found herself surrounded by an almost industrial number of prodigiously gifted players, all coming off the academy production line.

“There are clones and clones and clones of these amazing, technical, intelligent players,” she said, sounding both amazed and possibly a little scared. “There are hundreds of them.”

That Bonmatí has ​​been able to stand out from that group, even at a club that has been carefully calibrated to produce excellence and in a team that is packed with the best players in the world, can be attributed to her pursuit of integrity.

Xavi Hernández, coach of the Barcelona men’s team and Bonmatí’s childhood idol, described her as a “perfectionist” in the prologue of the book he published last year. She expresses it in another way. “I try to understand everything,” she said. “I am a very curious person.”

The psychology of God would suggest that he inherited that trait from his parents: both academics, both professors of Catalan literature, both sufficiently encouraged by the quest for equality that they forced a change in the law to allow Bonmatí to take his mother’s surnames, instead of a patronymic followed by matronymic.

It is a streak that Bonmatí has ​​not lost and that is best illustrated not so much by his continuous training —he is studying sports management, already aware at the age of 25 of the need to prepare for a life after football— but by his way of approaching it. race itself.

Bonmatí is – his words – “always doing things”. “Making a schedule is quite complicated,” she said. “I need to make sure I have time for myself, because otherwise I feel like I can’t breathe.” She believes that her teammates consider her “hyperactive.”

He has roles, off the field, with the United Nations agency for refugees, with the Johan Cruyff Foundation, with the Barcelona Foundation. She works with a team for refugee women.

When Walsh and Bronze arrived in Barcelona, ​​Bonmatí immediately volunteered to act as their de facto translator. If they needed anything, he told them, they just had to tell him. The gesture was based on kindness, but there was also a reward. “It means that I can improve my English,” he said. There was no ulterior motive for that: Bonmatí did not expect to turn it into an imminent move to England or the United States. She just wanted to be better at English.

Almost everything Bonmatí does is oriented towards a process of continuous improvement, of smoothing out flaws and making sure that nothing has been left unaddressed. She reads, and she reads a lot: Her house, she said, is full of books on nutrition, performance and psychology. (Even her downtime isn’t really downtime: Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl occupy the light-reading space.)

“The more things I know, the more I can apply what I know,” he said. “The smarter I am about those topics, the better it is for my performance.”

Then there is his kinesthetic apprenticeship: Far from Barcelona’s orbit, but with the approval of the club, he employs his own physical trainer, nutritionist and psychologist. She also questions them. “I want to know what I have to improve and how to do it,” she said.

It’s not exactly a surprise, then, that Bonmatí isn’t satisfied with Barcelona’s achievement of reaching the Champions League final once again. It is her, and the one from his team, the third in a row and the fourth overall. This stage is so familiar that Barcelona will enter as heavy favorites to beat Wolfsburg on Saturday.

That’s an achievement in itself, of course, testament to how far the Barcelona women’s team has come, to the status they’ve achieved, to the progress made by Bonmatí and her teammates. However, that is not what Bonmatí sees when she looks at the data. “We’ve only won one of the finals,” she said. “We have lost two. Personally, I want to win more.”