Moving the Goalposts | How Cata Coll became the present and future of Barcelona and Spain in a year | OneFootball

“Confident, risk-taker and big character,” Catalina “Cata” Coll says without hesitation when asked to describe herself as a player. The much-heralded promise of Barcelona and Spain has now become the present and the future and all it took was one summer.

A dreadful ACL tear in February 2022 ended Coll’s season and, with that, her hope to become second-choice keeper, much less first. With Sandra Paños the undisputed choice in goal, Gemma Font had no competition in the second position she had already won.

One year and 10 days later, Coll received the all-clear to return, just days after renewing her contract with Barcelona until 2026, 118 days until Spain’s 2023 World Cup squad was due to be announced and 13 assured matches left in the season. Despite having played 195 minutes of competitive football over the past year and a half, Coll made Jorge Vilda’s 23-strong World Cup squad.

At 22 years old, the keeper from Mallorca found herself making her surprise senior debut with the national team in the Round of 16 match, replacing Real Madrid’s Misa Rodríguez. Four matches later, Coll was a World Cup champion after keeping a clean sheet against England in the final.

Coll went back to Barcelona as the undisputed first-choice keeper, sending Paños to the bench for the first time in nine years at the club, while, in the process, cementing her place in the national team.

“Now that I’m more stable and I reflect on those months, they were chaotic,” she says. “I went from being injured, to winning a World Cup, to playing every match with club and winning a quadruple. It took a lot for me to understand the situations that I was in and was going through. I had to learn to calm down and relax. I’m still in the process of learning how to manage those emotions.”

Last season, Barcelona won 45 of 48 matches, losing one: the first leg of the Champions League semi-final against Chelsea. Thirty-three of those games were clean sheets, but Coll does not credit all that to the keeper. “I have some of the best players in front of me and I know it’s hard that the other team gets to my goal,” she says.

Being Barcelona shot-stopper is far from the stereotypical idea of a keeper. They use their feet just like any other outfield player and that is a drastic change if your development has been outside La Masia. But for Coll, it was an environment where she thrived.

Rarely does an outsider say it has been easy to adapt. “The Barcelona style of play is what I like and where I feel most comfortable. I wouldn’t change it,” she says. “Here, my teammates treat me as if I’m another outfield player and it’s all about playing and taking risks.

Being afraid of making mistakes playing out from the back is not something Coll admits to. She has made errors on the biggest stages, including the World Cup and Olympic Games, but it is a consequence of her game and she has no intention of changing.

“A lot of the time when I’ve made mistakes in a match, I’ve felt like it was because I wasn’t true to my game,’” she says. “I worked on it and I decided that if I’m going to fail or make a mistake, I’m going to do it being true to myself.

“I’d rather be known as ‘Cata Regate’ [the Spanish word for dribble] because it’s what defines me best. I always want to be true to what I feel and I want people to recognise me as a different keeper to the rest.”

The development of goalkeepers in women’s football has never been a priority for clubs and federations, the shortage of resources ensuring it has always been put on the back-burner.

Requiring specific and qualified training staff, it was easy to downgrade goalkeeping as it did not affect most of the squad. “Sandra Paños would tell me that she never had a goalkeeper coach until she arrived in the first team,” Coll says. “It’s changed a lot and nowadays. Little by little, you’ve seen people valuing more what it is to be a keeper.

“It’s not an easy position. You will always be either the hero or the centre of attention when you fail. It’s an attractive position that not many people are brave enough to do.”

With world-renowned keepers such as Paños, Christiane Endler, Sarah Bouhaddi and Anne-Katrin Berger coming to the end of their careers, it is time for a new wave. Coll is a World Cup champion and Champions League winner at 23.

Despitebeing so young, especially compared with some of her idols, she has already taken on the responsibility of continuing to develop her position for whoever will replace her. She has established a football school in her home town of Pòrtol, Mallorca. On a small island with limited resources and a small population, she is giving young girls who want to be a goalkeeper an environment where the realisation of that dream is a realistic one.

“My dad reminds me a lot,” Coll says when asked if she is aware of the effect she is having. “He reminds me that I can prove myself to a lot of people and a lot of kids,. When I was young, I had Sandra Paños, but that wasn’t until later on in my life. Watching women’s football was almost impossible.

“I’m really proud to be in this position, but it does scare me also, mainly for respect towards the significance of it.”

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• This article was amended on 5 March 2025. An earlier version stated incorrectly that Cata Coll had won silver and gold Olympic medals.

Header image: [Photograph: Jordi Matas/The Guardian]