Eleven goals in eight matches against Real Madrid. These are the numbers of Ewa Pajor, who sealed the Copa de la Reina quarterfinals with a brace at the Alfredo Di Stéfano Stadium (0-4). The Blaugrana showed no mercy and will be in the semifinals after a hard-fought match that ended with another resounding victory for Pere Romeu's team. Alexia Putellas—after heading in a corner chipped by Graham Hansen—and Salma Paralluelo—with a great pass from Patri Guijarro—completed the scoring. Barça continues its dominance and has now won 23 of the 24 Clásicos played.

"Barça is her place in the world," says Piotr Kozłowski, Ewa Pajor's (Uniejow, 1996) first football coach. The Polish striker has hit the ground running in Barcelona: in just a season and a half, she has already scored 63 goals in 69 matches, but her qualities go far beyond finding the net. "Her team spirit stands out; she creates chances for her teammates and makes decisions that benefit the entire squad, not just her own statistics. If she were more selfish, she would have even more goals, but she has a sense of responsibility and maturity on the pitch that make her a complete and highly valued player," says Kozłowski, who worked with Pajor from the age of eight to twelve. Pere Romeu has also highlighted these qualities. "She goes into every match motivated, presses relentlessly, makes runs, gets into the box, and holds up the ball with her back to goal. I really enjoy coaching her; she always performs at her best, and if she could, she would provide more assists."

The figures for the 2024-2025 financial year presented by Real Madrid shine, at first glance, like a freshly cleaned ceramic hob. The club, chaired by Florentino Pérez, closed the year with €1.185 billion in revenue, €24 million in profit, and a net worth of €598 million. Barça, on the other hand, closed the year with 994 million in revenue.17 million in losses and a negative net worth of 153 million. But, if you scratch the surface of Real Madrid's finances, you can find traces of dried-up oil, just like at Barcelona.

One of the few moments that broke the monotony from 11 am of the recent assembly It was when Joan Laporta called "scholars" and "mestretites" to critics around Barça while talking about preserving the club's ownership model. "The board I chair is the guarantor that Barça belongs to its members. Perhaps we are the only guarantors. Those who say that Barça is a company, those scholars, those mestretites that give lessons, alert and far away," Laporta said to the delegate members while raising his voice. But the same week, the club's treasurer, Ferran Olivé, had said that Goldman Sachs, the investment fund backing the financing of Espai Barça, was the one who chose Limak as the construction company for the remodeling of the Camp Nou.

The country is so stunned, so anesthetized, that football once again occupies its rightful place as an outlet for collective passions, so tamed since the defeat of the Partido Proceso (Procession Process). Banks and large corporations are back, their blackmail fulfilled; the sociovergence is slowly returning, with a single administrator, the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party). And the eternal duel between Barça and Madrid returns to channel a sentiment that has no mainstream political expression. A diffuse, globalized Catalanism hides behind the celebration of Barça's goals, and is also expressed in the truce with the eternal rival, the ministerial team full of galacticos. The Cularada no longer calls the 17:14 minute, but they enjoy chanting in Catalan and projecting a more manageable difference than the complex amalgam of loyalties that constitutes today's Catalonia. Football functions as a funnel or a still where a self-referential, real, and vibrant elixir is distilled, but politically innocuous, as it has always been, except during the decade of the Revolution.