Aitana Bonmatí all the time asks the identical query. Every recreation Barcelona Femení performs generates a flood of efficiency knowledge. The group’s health coaches understand how far every participant ran, how briskly, how lengthy. There is a lot info, in truth, that they want two days to obtain it and tabulate it and parse it. Only then is it handed again to the squad.

Not each participant pays a lot heed to that form of suggestions. Some disregard it fully. Bonmatí is totally different. She doesn’t simply need the reply; she desires to see the work, too. More than something, she desires to know the why.

“After some games, you feel so fatigued, so exhausted,” she stated. “But the data can be low. That’s because sometimes it is not just a physical thing. It can be 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.”

As far because the uncooked figures go, the 25-year-old Bonmatí’s season seems like this: 9 objectives scored, and 10 created, from midfield as Barcelona swept, but once more, to the Spanish title; 5 objectives scored, and 7 extra created, within the Champions League on the way in which to her — and her membership’s — fourth closing in 5 years. Only Wolfsburg’s Ewa Pajor has scored extra objectives than Bonmatí. Nobody has extra assists.

The case that Bonmatí has been essentially the most decisive, Most worthy participant in Europe this season is a compelling one. There is a powerful physique of proof, too, to counsel that she must be thought-about the main candidate for the Ballon d’Or, a minimum of till the World Cup rolls round.

The best rationalization for why is one which she rejects with out a second thought. It is Bonmatí, the idea goes, who has emerged as Barcelona’s heartbeat within the injury-enforced absence of Alexia Putellas, the membership’s captain. “She has taken a huge responsibility in midfield,” Fridolina Rolfo, Barcelona’s Swedish striker, stated earlier this 12 months. “She deserves all of the attention, in my opinion.”

Bonmatí has a barely totally different interpretation. “The coach is the boss,” she stated. This season, that coach — Jonatan Giráldez — has requested her to play a extra superior position than in earlier years, not solely to mitigate the absence of Putellas however as a result of the presence of Patri Guijarro, Ingrid Engen and Keira Walsh means the membership is well-stocked with defensive midfielders. “The role has changed,” Bonmatí stated. “But not because of me.”

Replacing Putellas, she stated, has been a collective effort. “The media always tries to find someone in the team to focus on, and now this year it is me,” she stated. “But I have been having good seasons for the last few years. I am ambitious. I just want to be better, more complete, than last year.”

Standing out at Barcelona is extra complicated than it would seem. Lucy Bronze, the English defender who moved to Catalonia final summer time, maybe captured it greatest. At Barcelona, she stated earlier this 12 months, she has discovered herself surrounded by an virtually industrial amount of prodigiously gifted gamers, all spooling off the academy’s manufacturing line.

“There are just like clones and clones and clones of these amazing, technical, intelligent players,” she stated, sounding concurrently awe-struck and probably just a bit frightened. “There are hundreds of them.”

That Bonmatí has been capable of stand out from that group — even at a membership that has been fastidiously calibrated to churn out excellence, and on a group that’s filled with the world’s best gamers — could be attributed to her seek for completeness.

Xavi Hernández, the coach of Barcelona’s males’s group and Bonmatí’s childhood idol, described her as a “perfectionist” within the prologue to the book she published last year. She places it a unique approach. “I try to understand everything,” she stated. “I am a very curious person.”

Cod psychology would counsel that she inherited that trait from her mother and father: each teachers, each lecturers in Catalan literature, each sufficiently animated by the pursuit of equality that they compelled a change within the regulation to permit Bonmatí to take her mom’s surnames, slightly than a patronymic adopted by a matronymic.

It is a streak that Bonmatí has not misplaced, and one greatest illustrated not a lot by her persevering with training — she is learning sports activities administration, already conscious at age 25 of the necessity to put together for a life after soccer — however by her method to her profession itself.

Bonmatí is — her phrases — “always doing things.” “Making a schedule is quite complicated,” she stated. “I need to make sure to get time for myself, because otherwise I feel like I can’t breathe.” Her teammates, she believes, think about her to be “hyperactive.”

She has roles, away from the sphere, with the United Nations refugee company, with the Johan Cruyff Foundation, with the Barcelona Foundation. She works with a group for feminine refugees.

When Walsh and Bronze arrived at Barcelona, Bonmatí instantly volunteered to behave as their de facto translator. If they wanted something, she instructed them, they simply needed to inform her. The gesture was rooted in kindness, however there was a payoff, too. “It means I get to improve my English,” she stated. There was no ulterior motive for that — Bonmatí wasn’t hoping to parlay it into an imminent transfer to England or the United States. She simply wished to be higher at English.

Almost every part Bonmatí does is geared towards a means of infinite enchancment, of smoothing out flaws and ensuring nothing has gone unconsidered. She reads, and she or he reads broadly: Her house, she stated, is filled with books on diet, on efficiency, on psychology. (Even her downtime isn’t actually downtime: The likes of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl occupy the sunshine studying slot.)

“The more things that I know, the more I can apply what I know,” she stated. “The smarter I am about those subjects, the better it is for my performance.”

Then there may be her kinesthetic studying: Away from Barcelona’s orbit, however with the membership’s blessing, she employs her personal health coach, nutritionist and psychologist. She questions them, too. “I want to know what I have to improve, and how to do it,” she stated.

It isn’t precisely a shock, then, that Bonmatí is hardly happy by Barcelona’s achievement in reaching the Champions League closing but once more. It is her, and her membership’s, third in a row, and their fourth total. This stage is so acquainted that Barcelona will go in because the heavy favourite to beat Wolfsburg on Saturday.

That is an achievement in itself, after all, testomony to how far Barcelona’s girls’s group has come, to the standing it has attained, to the progress made by Bonmatí and her teammates. That isn’t what Bonmatí sees, although, when she seems on the knowledge. “We have only won one of the finals,” she stated. “We’ve lost two. Personally, I want to win more.”