The move to Barcelona marked a substantial step up in the standard of football. Yet, there was not the same improvement in conditions off the pitch.
After training, Bonmati and her Barcelona youth team-mates would make do with cold showers in makeshift changing rooms.
Gym sessions and tactical video analysis lectures, pivotal to developing their teenage minds and bodies for the professional game, never happened.
And, while their male counterparts had the famed La Masia, Barcelona’s female youth players had no similar on-site residential facility to help their training.
Instead, once their three-hour training sessions finished around midnight, Bonmati would watch her team-mates climb into family cars to head back to their distant hometowns, fighting off sleep to study schoolwork as they went.
And they were the lucky ones.
Bonmati used to take public transport every day, first the bus and then the train, to be able to train with Barcelona. This was because her mother suffers from chronic pain condition fibromyalgia and was often unable to drive and her father had not passed his test.
It was a journey of 23 miles and more than an hour each way for Bonmati.
“I was running so as not to miss the train home… I even wondered if it was worth all the effort,” she admitted last year, thinking back to those days.
“She got tired because it was tough,” her aunt Lili said. “She was about to quit football in adolescence.”
Aitana was 13 when her mother suggested that, as well as working hard towards her goals, she should also work on herself.
Bonmati started seeing a psychologist, focusing on accepting frustration as a normal part of achievement and the pursuit of excellence.
Some of the exercises that she learned, such as writing down her emotions to help ease their burden on her mind, she still practises today.
Through these testing years, though, Bonmati’s love of football never wavered. Former team-mate Carla Rivera vividly recalls Bonmati’s relentless pursuit of improvement.
“I recall her being extremely demanding of herself, obsessed with sport and driven to improve,” Rivera told BBC Sport.
“There were times when she stayed overnight at my place after late training sessions, and after dinner she remained engrossed in football-related content on the internet.”
The obsession did not translate into instant success. When Lluis Cortes was appointed manager of Barcelona in 2019, the 21-year-old Bonmati was a fringe player.
“Aitana is a very ambitious player who always wants to play and be important, and that role was proving to be challenging for her,” admitted Cortes of Bonmati’s bit-part presence in the team.
However, Cortes, who knew the midfielder from working with the Catalan ‘national’ team, was soon won over by her determination and quality.
“She’s a player who gives her all in every training session, and through that she has undoubtedly secured her place in the first team,” he added.
Bonmati has since emerged as a key player in Barcelona’s midfield, winning four successive domestic titles and two Champions Leagues.
Bonmati’s importance for club and country increased after Alexia Putellas, her predecessor as the Ballon d’Or winner, suffered a knee ligament injury in 2022.
