'A real dream': The galactic journey of the Heel players

On May 28, 2016, just turned 17, Sara Ezquerro put on the Madrid jacket of her idol Iker Casillas and went to the Santiago Bernabéu to see on the big screen the Champions League final that Real Madrid and Real Madrid were playing in Milan. Atlético de Madrid.

She was a regular at the stadium, where she went in big games to set the mood and greet the team bus.

In that final, the eleventh Champions of Madrid, Sara shouted the goals of Real and lamented those of Atlético.

She jumped euphoric with the penalty scored by Cristiano Ronaldo that liquidated the colchoneros.

He ended up being photographed from the Bernabéu with a friend, María Calvo, and the photo was posted on social networks with the phrase "Kings of Europe."

There was only one problem: Sara Ezquerro was Atlético de Madrid's goalkeeper, and María Calvo was a former player from the same team.

When Sara entered Twitter, the first thing she saw was a photo of her in various newspapers and more than a hundred notifications.

To the insults of "rat, pig, whore" were added wishes that she would be raped, death threats and notices that it was known where she lived.

The next day she was fired from Atlético.

She spent several weeks without leaving the house alone.

Sara Ezquerro tells her story in

a documentary produced by Newtral and Exile Content for HBO, where it premiered this week.

Sara is 21 years old today and keeps the same goal as her idol, Iker Casillas: that of Real Madrid.

She is only a small piece of the puzzle that is being built in Valdebebas, the largest sports city in the world, and that has all the answers in the Club Deportivo Tacón, a team from the Las Carcavas neighborhood, in Hortaleza, created in 2014 by Ana Rosell, former Atlético de Madrid player, and merged two years later with Canillas.

"We could not sit in our previous dressing room, and now we get lost," say the players about the difference between Las Carcavas and Valdebebas.

"We come from the mud," Rosell tells the cameras.

"We know, we know where we come from, what it took to get here and that is why we give so much importance to what we are experiencing," says another player, Esther Martín-Pozuelo.

Hence, the women's Madrid wardrobe is full of posters, messages and stickers from the Heel.

The promotion to First, after remaining at the gates the previous season, was also a matter of his old facilities, his precarious means, his ambition without limits.

In

, directed by the journalist Ana Pastor, several issues that exclusively concern women's football are explored, such as discrimination, machismo or motherhood.

The captain of Heel, now Real Madrid, is the Vallecana Malena Ortiz, a soccer fan since she was a child like her twin sister, also a Madrid player, Samara.

The two tell in the documentary how from the age of eight they wanted to play soccer with the children, without success (“they laughed, they kicked us out, anyway…”).

Their parents decided to sign them up for other sports so that they would become fond of some, but soccer was stronger.

In Rayo Vallecano they found the perfect habitat, and from there, to Tacón.

Malena, precisely, gives title to the second chapter of A real dream: Asllanis and Malenas, evoking the Zidanes and Pavones with which Madrid sought to establish a philosophy of homegrown and galactic at the beginning of the century.

Kosovare Asllani is a 31-year-old Swedish scorer and, together with her teammate Sofia Jakobsson, were Madrid's first flashy signings.

"Here is a world of girls who come to play in the second division and other players who come to play the World Cup," recalls the coach, David Aznar.

"And when the stars came and you see the players taking selfies with them in the locker room, you think: huff, here's work."

The first professional match for many of them was in 2019 at the Johan Cruyff stadium, packed to the brim, and against Barcelona, ​​runner-up in Europe.

The first classic, although Madrid still under the official name of Heel.

The madridistas received four goals in the first half.

The cameras of the documentary go into the changing room: “If we are not intense, if we are not concentrated, if we do not run everything, they put us nine.

You have to go on and on until the end ”, warns the coach, David Aznar.

The second half begins with a white goal, but soon the castle and the illusion collapses: White has received, at the end of the game, nine goals.

"Many of my teammates were nervous," says Asllani, recalling that Barça's first goal is a childish mistake by the defense that ends up handing the ball to the rival.

Barça were once again the first rival in the atypical 20/21 league, and this time the Barça players won 0-4 in Madrid. The Heel no longer exists, it has been Real Madrid since July of this year. And, after the first lap, he took second place in the standings. Everything behind, from the moment when the children of the lower categories of Madrid saw women for the first time in Valdebebas to train there ("they were blown away, they all said timidly 'hello, hello," says Malena), Dissect in this meticulous and revealing documentary, full of details and parallel stories, that shows a landing that was made too much to wait, that of the soccer players in the most famous soccer club in the world