Long before Spain lifted the Women's World Cup, or stadiums began to fill up to watch women playing football**,** there was already a Spanish women's team playing international matches without the support of the federation.
In the early 1970s, a group of footballers travelled around the country promoting a sport that was still viewed with suspicion under the Franco dictatorship. That team went on to face Portugal and Italy and had a captain who would become one of the greatest legends of Spanish women's football: Concepción Sánchez Freire, better known as Conchi Amancio.
Regarded as the first Spanish female professional footballer, Conchi spent a 25-year career in Italy and England and scored more than 500 goals**.** Yet, more than half a century after her first successes, she remains largely unknown to much of the public.
Her story and those of other pioneers of Spanish women's football are the inspiration behind 'Pioneers. They Just Wanted to Play' (source in Spanish), the new film by Marta Díaz de Lope Díaz, which hits cinemas on 12 June. For the director, the lack of awareness that still surrounds these players was precisely one of the reasons for bringing their story to the big screen. "I found it incredible that I myself didn't know about this story," she tells Euronews. "I've loved football since I was a child, I like telling stories about women and I thought it was a fascinating story."
