The Boca Juniors Gladiators beat the UAI Urquiza Warriors this Sunday with a tight 2-1 and once again shouted champions in Argentine women's soccer.
It was a calendar prophecy.
The two best teams in the league went into the last game undefeated and had to define the champion on the pitch.
Boca prevailed and won its twenty-eighth trophy, the fourth since the professional league was formed in 2019. Once the statistics were resolved, the Gladiators wrote another story: they played in La Bombonera, the mythical Boca stadium where the fans are capable of causing seismic movements , and filled the enabled places.
18,000 people saw the champions this afternoon, a record attendance in women's soccer in Argentina and a precedent on the popularity of their teams.
It was not be for lowerly.
With 18 wins and a draw, Urquiza was the leader of the championship with 55 points.
It was enough for him with a tie to be champion.
Boca, 17 wins, two draws and 53 points, needed to win to lift the trophy again.
The expectation for the game was so great that the Boca leadership gave in midweek: the Gladiators, who usually fill the stands of the training ground where they play their home games, would play this afternoon in the main stadium.
La Bombonera, a stadium for 54,000 people that opened in 1940, opened its doors to the women's team for the fourth time in its history.
The Gladiadoras fulfilled the expectation from the seven minutes of the first half.
Urquiza was pressing in the middle of the field when Amancay Urbani recovered the ball and hit a shot into the air that Yamila Rodríguez, Boca's captain, controlled with her head and defined with her left foot down against a post.
He celebrated the goal hanging from the fence that separates the popular grandstand from the stadium.
The Guerreras tied it in the 24th minute with a goal from Daiana Falfán, but as soon as the second half began, Boca sealed their victory with a superb header from their historic scorer, Andrea Ojeda.
La Bombonera was a party.
Not only because of the historic victory, but because Boca Juniors once again sold tickets to the public after almost 20 years.
The most popular team in Argentina announced in May that it had registered 300,000 members, a mark that is only surpassed by the German Bayern Munich and that means an almost impossible bottleneck to overcome for those who want to watch a match in the stadium with the most football myths Argentine and are not affiliated with the club.
The season tickets to watch a match at La Bombonera are distributed among more than 125,000 members and the vacant seats are then raffled among the 175,000 adherents, who pay a reduced monthly fee.
For the Gladiadoras match, Boca enabled only 25,000 seats "for security reasons", of which 5,000 went on sale.
Tickets cost 600 Argentine pesos, about four dollars at the official exchange rate.
A sea of difference from the 12,000 pesos that the luckiest tourist can pay for resale.
"Any soccer player is dying to play on this field," Boca midfielder Clarisa Huber summed up after the victory.
As she spoke in front of public television cameras, fans chanted "Come on, champion! Come on, champion!"
improvised, different from the songs promoted by the brave bar that this time did not attend the stadium.
It was not necessary.
"We needed a match like this, with these people, with this pressure," said Huber, who returned to Argentine soccer from Spain when the league became professional.
"I never imagined living this, my soul explodes."
The 18,000 people who attended this afternoon's game are still far from the 91,648 people who watched the Barcelona and Wolfsburg women's teams in April this year, but it is an unprecedented mark in Argentina.
The record until today was held by the national team, which brought 15,000 fans to a match against Chile earlier in the year.
Women's soccer celebrates a historic mark this Sunday, but it still has open battles: some players need a second job to make ends meet, and except for one team, all of the national league are based in Buenos Aires.
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