Onwards and upwards

There is a curious paradox in the relationship we currently have with the United States. Politically, scepticism is growing: tariffs, diplomatic distance, a certain ostentatious indifference towards Europe. And yet, culturally, the current continues to flow in the opposite direction. Major American sports organisations are looking this way with an ambition their political leaders rarely display. The NBA has been sounding out the idea of a permanent transatlantic competition for some time. It is a tension that says something about how societies really work: the ties that matter are not woven by governments, but by shared narratives.

One of those narratives returns every March in the United States with almost liturgical regularity. The NCAA Tournament — known as March Madness — has spent eight decades turning a university basketball tournament into the biggest sporting event of the year, even above the NBA Finals. What is fascinating is not the sport itself, but what it produces: millions of people following unknown students from universities they probably could not place on a map with genuine fervour, feeling part of something that, technically, has nothing to do with them. It is the same logic that turns certain books, certain movements or certain moments into phenomena no one can ever fully explain. They emerge because something was already there, waiting for someone to hold it in their gaze.

In the women’s tournament in recent years, that logic acquired a proper name: Caitlin Clark. The Iowa guard broke historic viewing records while still in college, without the backing of a billion-dollar franchise or decades of accumulated visibility. What she built was something more elusive than the beginning of an extraordinary sporting career: a narrative that people felt belonged to them, even if they had never watched a game. When that happens — when something transcends its own sphere and reaches people who were not looking for it — then we are no longer talking (only) about sport.

Spain has had players of genuine world-class stature — Laia Palau, Anna Cruz, Silvia Domínguez, among many others — present at the elite level for decades, winning everything there was to win. Most of us discovered them late, almost in passing, when they were already nearing the end of their careers. It is not a question of merit or effort: it is a question of focus. What does not enter the frame does not disappear, but nor does it leave a mark. And that mark — what a generation takes to be possible without even questioning it — is, in the long run, what truly changes things.

The figures suggest that something has shifted. The Spanish Basketball Federation closed 2025 with nearly half a million registered players — growth of more than 20% in four years — and the most eloquent detail is also the one that passes most unnoticed: women’s registrations are growing at twice the rate of men’s. Basketball is already the sport with the highest number of registered female players in Spain. That growth cannot be explained by any one institutional campaign in particular. It is explained, to a large extent, by the fact that a generation of girls is growing up seeing Mariona Ortíz, Raquel Carrera and Iyana Martín as something that simply forms part of what is possible, without anyone having had to persuade them of it.

And that is where we are: living through a moment in which transatlantic relations are being negotiated with mistrust, while at the same time the NBA dreams of establishing itself in Europe. There is something revealing in that image: while some are building barriers, sport goes on building bridges, because the narratives that truly connect people know nothing of borders or tariffs. And March Madness is a case in point: a university tournament that, through Caitlin Clark, ended up telling us something about how a society decides where to direct its gaze. Spain today has its own raw material. The focus on women’s basketball is growing, and with it a youth pipeline and a front line already competing among the world elite. There is something in the air that is still waiting to be named, but looks very much like a narrative in the making — and that narrative is increasingly taking the shape of a woman. What remains is easy enough to state and slower to achieve: that they remain there, competing and winning, and that we learn to look (and invest in them). Because what is seen, exists. And what exists, inspires. In the end, learning how to look always comes before anything else.

By Irene Mulà Olmos – Manager at Harmon