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BARCELONA: Spain attacker Jenni Hermoso lifted the Women’s World Cup in August 2023 but her joy was curtailed in the aftermath as she unexpectedly became the leader of a stand against sexism in Spanish football.
Luis Rubiales, the then-Spanish football federation president who later resigned in disgrace, forcibly kissed Hermoso on the mouth during the medal ceremony in Sydney, provoking a global wave of criticism.
Hermoso, 34, denied Rubiales’s claim the kiss was consensual and he stands trial starting February 3 for alleged sexual assault.
Rubiales, as well as former women’s team coach Jorge Vilda and two former federation officials, are also accused of coercion for allegedly pressuring Hermoso to say the kiss was consensual.
The world initially took the fight to Rubiales on Hermoso’s behalf while she was away on holiday with her team-mates celebrating the World Cup win, which she called “the best feeling” she has ever had in football.
After Rubiales produced a defiant speech in which he refused to step down, the situation exploded and Hermoso issued a strongly worded statement in which she clarified she felt the “victim of an assault, a macho act.”
Hermoso and 80 other Spain players announced a strike from the national team until the leadership changed, and world football’s governing body FIFA suspended Rubiales.
Eventually he resigned in September, while Vilda was sacked by the Spanish football federation.
Although all that followed overshadowed Spain’s success, the World Cup victory remains the crowning glory of Hermoso’s sporting career.
The grand-daughter of former Atletico Madrid goalkeeper Antonio Hernandez, Madrid-born Hermoso started at youth level with Atletico.
She enjoyed watching Fernando Redondo and Zinedine Zidane, who were then at Real Madrid, but had no real idol of her own until she joined Atletico.
There she met women’s team player Ana Fernandez, known as “Nervy,” and immediately looked up to her.
With no budget for scouts, the senior women players fulfilled that role and Nervy selected Hermoso and one other player from a field of 50 youngsters to join the club.
“She is left-handed like me, she played in the same position as me and I loved the way she was, she had a lot of charisma,” Hermoso told newspaper El Pais in 2020.
In 2010 she joined Rayo Vallecano, where she won the Spanish title, before a brief stint in Sweden with Tyreso, where she played alongside Brazil legend Marta.
Hermoso moved to Barcelona in January 2014, where she went on to become the women’s team’s all-time top scorer with 181 goals in 224 matches, across two spells.
In the summer of 2017 she moved to Paris Saint-Germain for a season before rejoining Atletico Madrid, and then returning to Barcelona in 2019.
Hermoso was part of Barcelona women’s first ever Champions League victory in 2021, winning a penalty in the final as her side romped to a 4-0 win over Chelsea.
She signed for Mexican side Pachuca in 2022 — which some suggested amounted to stepping away from the top level — and joined Tigres in 2024 in the same division.
“I was retired and I won the World Cup,” Hermoso sarcastically fired back at her detractors on social media platform X after Spain’s World Cup triumph.
However a far deeper controversy was already brewing after Rubiales’s forced kiss on Spain’s leading women’s scorer of all time, with 57 goals.
It led to the fall of Rubiales and Vilda, as well as the Spanish government overseeing the football federation “in response to the crisis in the organization.”
Hermoso took some time to find her own football idol, but for many of the next generation, she is already that figure.