The seventh month of the Roman calendar arrives, and like every year, it does so with a slap in the face of reality. After days of leisure and sea and mountains and games, of happiness, after all, routine returns and men and women return to the office, to the factory, to the kitchen. They do so in flocks, like migratory birds unable to choose, grey birds that fly in formation towards the same destination. These men and women are also followed by their children, for whom summer has been just a sigh of relief and they are beginning to understand the fleeting nature of time. Sitting eight hours a day at their desks, they look out of the school window, beginning to ask themselves, timidly, about the meaning of it all, while their teachers scold them for not paying attention to what is important, the blackboard, that rectangle that is supposed to explain the world out there.
In the afternoons, when the sun sets a little earlier each day, there are extracurricular activities, activities that in theory were invented to complement formal education, but which, in practice in this neo-capitalist race in which we live, are the embodiment of the parents’ desire to create the ideal worker, a kind of Terminator for the job market. Languages, arts, robotics, chess, every father and mother puts the ingredients of the recipe that they believe will form the perfect being that their child will be in the future. And, in the middle of this exhausting nightmare of routine, there is sport: the football field, the basketball court, the swimming pool, the sports center.
It is worth asking whether it is really positive for a child, in this context of daily demands, to play a team sport like football. Is it good from an educational point of view to train two or three times a week, often at night and in the rain and cold, after English and before maths and language homework? I think so, of course, but it depends on who the child is in charge of when he or she enters the playing field. It seems obvious, however, while we select the school and the language academy with dedication and concern, in the team we take everything for granted. At school we are interested in the educational curriculum our child will have, who the teacher will be, what the working method will be, but at the football club we give total freedom to the coach or sports director on duty to use our children as pieces on a board, decide what to do with them and, without further explanation, move them from one team to another, from the good ones to the bad ones or vice versa.
Call me an idealist, but I am one of those who believe that training camp should be a refuge for children, a parenthesis from the reality that lies outside, a place from which they emerge strengthened for everyday life and not the opposite, never a space that harms them. In other words: it should be a game, something that entertains them and allows them to think about something other than their obligations, their parents and teachers. Never, under any circumstances, a place where they receive more pressure than they already carry in their lives, where they are told that they are not up to par or, I don’t know what is worse, where they are demanded as if they were adults.
In recent weeks I have seen several cases of children who have stopped playing because they have been made to believe that they are bad, and many others of children who do not want to wear the football shirt again because they have been asked too much on the pitch. Football being their passion, what they like most, these children have ended up stepping aside. Each one of these children embodies a failure: that of the clubs that do not understand that they are dealing with children, that of the parents who have allowed someone to shatter their children’s dreams, that of a football that has ceased to be a game in the eyes of these children.
