The Catalan club is the only club to have won the Catalan Beach Soccer Championship in every category
On the Catalan coast in the northeast corner of Spain sits the picturesque town of Roses. Well known as a tourist hotspot, it is also an increasingly big player on the beach soccer scene.
The region of Catalonia has already produced many big names in our sport, such as Llorenç Gomez (2018 Best Player), Edu Suarez (scorer of 2018’s Best Goal) as well as several other players who represent Spain on the international stage including Adri Frutos and Carla Morera.
For anyone who follows the Euro Winners Cup, the name Roses Platja will be a familiar one, as the women’s side, featuring players from the Spanish national team who currently lead the women’s world ranking, are regular competitors.
The club has become is the only side to have won the Catalan Beach Soccer Championship in all categories: U14, U17, senior male and female, something that has never happened before. “We are proud to be the only club to have won in all four categories and this shows that we are working hard and we are on the right track,” said Dani Haro, president and coordinator of the club.
As well as this achievement, Roses also lifted the Youth Cup for the first time, “a category that has always been complicated because the players are already starting to work and Roses is a tourist town that lives of the summer season. This year’s team, however, made the Catalan Championship a priority and the players were looking for jobs that they could combined with training and competing”, adds the club’s president.
On the conception of the Roses Plajta project almost ten years ago, Haro states that “at the beginning we only had a men’s senior team made up of friends who had been playing for years. a local tournament and we decided to create the club to compete at the national level.
New people started coming in, and five years ago I decided to organize the first beach soccer camp, when there were still no national grassroots competitions. Two years later, we started the Youth (Under 17) and Cadet (Under 14) categories and took the opportunity to change the format: instead of doing just the camp, the school was founded, with training in the afternoon, just like in football. We currently have the beach soccer school and the September camp, which is used to scout the possible teams for the coming year and is also the closing of the season.”
One of the coaches and captain of the senior women’s team, Silvia Ferrer, better known as ‘Chivi’, states that Roses Platja is a very important team in beach soccer, it gives us a lot of professionalism and we have the opportunity to play more competitions in addition to the Championship of Catalonia. In our organization, beach soccer is experienced intensely, in a different way to other clubs.”
One of the keys to the success of Roses Platja is that the vast majority of the players who are part of the club are from the town. “It is the most important thing, because if they were not from Roses, the project would not go ahead. We are very lucky that 98% of the players are from here and this fills us with pride and helps us a lot when it comes to training, as all the players are just five minutes from the beach and it makes everything much easier. In the future we want the first team to be 100% Roses. For me, I’m proud to go out and see children in the Roses Platja T-shirt, which we renew every year and you see many personalized shirts”, says an enthused Haro.
The support they receive from the local institutions in the area is also key. “Roses Council is helping us more and more, but it is very difficult to do everything yourself and manage eight categories, with everything that it entails. And we must add the participation in the national league, the Spanish Cup, the Catalan Championship and the European Cup, both in the men’s and women’s categories”, says Haro.
“You have to sacrifice a lot at the club level and personally. Much of the time we have to go and look for private sponsors to cover our expenses, and if we can’t find them we have to pay out of our own pockets”, says Chivi.
“We are not a football club which has an organisation team with a lot of staff”, adds Dani. “I am alone, although now I have the help of some friends who have also been playing beach soccer for years. The help in minimal.”
“It is not a well-known sport. In general, people don’t follow beach soccer and don’t know what it’s about. You need to explain to them how it works to try to get them to invest in you. With few exceptions, large companies are reluctant to put money into beach soccer. “
Dani Haro not only serves as president and coordinator, but is also the captain of the first team. That’s why, “being the only club in all of Spain that has played all the official competitions fills me with pride and gives me more strength to continue with this project. We are one of the smallest clubs in terms of finances and badge. You have Levante, Cádiz, Valencia, Recreativo de Huelva…, who are much bigger, but we, with a lot of effort, have succeeded. I think this should be valued, the people of the town are very happy with the performance of the club.
As Haro states, “the goals are set by the generations”, and this year it has been very fun and entertaining, especially with the women’s senior team finishing second in the Spanish Cup, and the men in fourth place. Competing in the Women’s Euro Winners Cup, in the national men’s and women’s national leagues and in the Catalan championship, we can see how we have grown in terms of both performance and reputation. The fact that we finished the Spanish Cup in these positions is a success that will be difficult to repeat. We are lucky that the women’s senior side is a solid team and it is an honour to be able to take our badge around Europe. People now know Roses Platja”.
For her part, Chivi explains that “the work, the passion for this sport and the ambition to improve day after day” mean that they go into each season with renewed enthusiasm. “We enter all the competitions in order to win them. Sacrifice and the winning spirit are non-negotiable for us”, she concludes.
As for the national teams, in the Spanish Championships in which Catalonia has participated, out of 48 players who have competed in the male and female senior teams, U14 and U17 categories, 25 have come from Roses Platja. “It gives me a lot of strength to see that more than 50% of those selected are from Roses, it’s a great satisfaction. Making the Catalan national team is a great motivator of all the players, not only in Roses, but throughout the region. Having the possibility of being called up means that on the coldest and windiest days we also go out to train to achieve the goal of being called up with the Catalan national team. And now is when the players realize that, with the arrival of the Under 21s, that they can be pre-selected for the Spanish mational team.”
