(Reuters) – England defender Lucy Bronze may be a European Championship winner but concedes that she is still getting up to speed at her new club Barcelona, having signed for the Spanish champions shortly before the Euro 2022 campaign.
The 30-year-old moved to Spain following a second stint at Women’s Super League side Manchester City where she won the League Cup earlier this year before lifting the Euro trophy at Wembley after England beat Germany in the final last month.
However, despite her years of playing at the highest level including winning three straight Champions League titles with French side Olympique Lyonnais, Bronze said that Barcelona’s passing and possession-heavy play is “another level of intensity”.
“We have a few injuries at the minute and in pre-season we’ve got a lot of kids playing, but even they’ve just got Barcelona in the blood,” Bronze told The Guardian in an interview published on Wednesday.
“It’s phenomenal to me to see all these 16- or 17-year-olds that are up to the pace of Barcelona’s playing style.
“Trying to understand the rules in Spanish and then play this intense Spanish, Barcelona football is pretty intense in the first week or so, and then there’s the heat.”
The defender said that once the pre-season friendly games were well underway, things got a little bit easier, being “more natural and free flowing”.
Bronze, who is back at England’s St George’s Park training base ahead of their final World Cup qualifiers against Austria and Luxembourg over the next week, said she got a head start on learning Spanish to help settle in.
“They were all really surprised that I’d already taken some Spanish lessons off my own back,” she said.
“Having already played abroad, I know it’s so important to be able to communicate. I want to speak to everyone, I want to be friends with everyone, so it’s important that I learn.”
Born to a Portuguese father and a English mother, Bronze had been brought up bilingual. The right back is also fluent in French after her three years with Lyon.
“The Spanish, I pick up a lot of words, but my pronunciation is terrible because I keep putting a French accent on,” she added.
“But there’s a lot of words that are similar to Portuguese and French. So, in the meetings I don’t have a translator, I just kind of pick up words and look at the actions on the videos.”
Barcelona, who reached last year’s Champions League final having won the competition in 2021, begin the defence of their league title at Levante on Sunday, Sept. 11.
(Reporting by Anita Kobylinska in Gdansk; Editing by Christian Radnedge)
