Giving new meaning to the phrase “goals”, a girls’ football team in Spain has made headlines by coming top of the league – a league which, until recently, was open only to boys.

AEM Lleida, an amateur club based in Lleida, around 100 miles west of Barcelona, has coached girls’ football for almost ten years. Their under-14s team has now won a junior regional league, defeating no less than 13 rival boys’ teams in the process.

The New York Times reports that the league in question had been filled exclusively by male teams until 2014. It was then that officials at AEM decided that their girls, who had consistently bested other girls’ teams in the area, were ready to take on the boys.

In entering AEM into the boys’ league, the club took advantage of a Spanish football federation rule which allows boys and girls to play against each other (including in mixed teams) until they are 14.

AEM president Sergio González says that the decision to enter the girls into the boys’ league wasn’t an easy one, despite their obvious talent on the pitch. “A few parents called us crazy when we registered the team,” he tells the Times. “If this had gone very wrong, we would have been held responsible for humiliating the girls.”

Meet the girls’ football team who joined a boys’ league – and won it