Pedro Iriondo, CEO of FC Badalona Women, believes the biggest moments in women’s football only matter if clubs can hold on to the fans they bring in. Speaking at WFS Madrid 2026 on a panel about sustaining the growth of the women’s game, he described World Cups and European Championships as the sport’s shop window, and placed the responsibility for what comes next with the clubs: “I always say it’s like the fireworks. It’s great. Every four years or every two years, everyone comes, everyone looks at us. But then what happens when the fireworks are done, what’s left, and that’s on us, the club game.”
Badalona is the first Spanish club backed by an ownership group dedicated to women’s football. In March, Mercury/13, the group behind Como Women and Bristol City Women, took a majority stake in the Liga F side.
After the fireworks
For Iriondo, international football works as “the acquisition point for fans”. Many people discover women’s football for the first time through a major tournament, and the club game has to be ready for them. If the structures, the commercial model and the marketing strategy are not in place, he warned, those new fans “will just naturally leave”. He pointed to other sports that fill stadiums at the Olympics or a World Cup but have little to show at club level, and wants women’s football to avoid that path. What keeps people coming back, in his view, is stories, infrastructure and a competitive league.
The product is not the problem
Iriondo is clear about where the work lies. “We believe that product is not the problem,” he said. “Problem is everything, the package around it.” For a club like Badalona, that package starts with accessibility in the widest sense: a stadium people can reach easily, but also the stories, the narrative and the rivalries between players and clubs that give a casual viewer a reason to care.
It also means changing how a football club thinks. The sport, he argued, has grown used to “a bit of a traditional mentality of we just open the doors and people come through”. Women’s football is not there yet. In his estimate, a typical fan of the women’s game goes to a stadium once a year, and even the most committed go only two or three times. Badalona’s answer is to treat every person who comes through the gates as a committed fan from the very first match.
A three-match season ticket
The clearest example of that approach is Badalona’s new season ticket. Asking a newcomer to choose between a single match and a full campaign, Iriondo argued, ignores how fans actually behave: “It cannot be that we’re making people choose between either you go to one game or you go to 15 games, because we haven’t built that habit yet.” So the club has launched a three-match pack that carries the same benefits as a full season ticket. “If you buy a three-match pack, I’m going to treat you like a season ticket holder,” he said.
Every first-time visitor is then offered that pack, a model Iriondo compares to the way a new business wins its first customers. Badalona is, as he put it, at the very beginning of that journey and still learning.
A generation that asks a different question
Iriondo sees the next decade as an opportunity that the club game cannot afford to miss. The people running football, himself included, grew up in a different ecosystem and are “rewiring” their minds. The next generation will not have to. He shared what happens at home when he tells his son that Barça are playing: “He says, the boys or the girls? That’s his question.”
For Iriondo, that generation is the one women’s football has to win, by shaping the way they consume and engage with the game from the start. As he put it: “It’s all about habit.”
