The shame of winning 34-0

"We apologize, we don't like this result.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 October 2022 Wednesday 08:31
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The shame of winning 34-0

"We apologize, we don't like this result." This is the tweet posted on social networks by Gimnástica Segoviana, the flagship club of the capital of the province of Segovia, a modest but historic entity of Spanish football, founded in 1928 and now active in the Second Federation. The tweet referred to what happened on Saturday, October 15, in a futsal game, the first of the season, in the underage category, 6-year-old children.

La Segoviana had won 0-34 against Club Deportivo Carbonero, the team from Carbonero el Mayor, a Segovian municipality of just over 2,500 inhabitants and located about 30 kilometers from the provincial capital. For once the victory blushed the winner and not the loser. After the beating, the Segoviana board of directors issued the following statement: "We apologize to CD Carbonero for an unnecessarily bulky scoreboard that collides with the idea of ​​what grassroots sport should be."

In La Segoviana they believe that this whole issue has been oversized. That it is not something so unusual and that to understand what happened you have to understand how things work in rural Spain. An official spokesperson for La Segoviana stressed to La Vanguardia that "it is quite common for our grassroots football teams to have to go play against those from very small towns, where sometimes there are very few children and they have to put together a team with kids of below grade."

The same spokesman maintains that "as can be understood, our idea of ​​football does not go through overwhelming all the teams we come across, which, moreover, are our natural quarry."

“The problem – he maintains – is how to tell a 6-year-old to stop scoring goals. It could be done like in other sports, when a bulging scoreboard stops a game. Our purpose is to discuss it with the Castilla y Léon Federation and suggest, as a recommendation, that after a certain number the goals stop being counted in the minutes.

In last Sunday's game the score at halftime was already 0-21. La Segoviana had scored at a rate of one goal every minute. In the second, the bar was lowered and the goals were only thirteen more.

If in Segoviana what they want is to turn the page of the match, in Carbonero el Mayor they are even more fed up with everything that this win has meant. “We want to forget what happened; especially for the good of the kids who are the ones who least understand this debate”, comment sources from the city council.

The same sources appreciate the tweet asking for forgiveness from Segoviana “but, in the end, it was not necessary. La Segoviana is our reference club and all this controversy does not help grassroots football”.

Goleadas of that look have also affected from time to time the powerful of Spanish football. Two seasons ago a match for cadets (14 and 15 years old) in the Valencian Community ended 0-30. On December 13, 2020, the Real Madrid of Benjamins (8 and 9 years old) won (0-31) against Villaverde de San Andrés. The thrashed club then posted a harsh statement against Real Madrid. “We show our indignation at this type of situation. The big clubs should use sports strategies to avoid these goals and the Federation needs to restructure these categories, ”they affirmed.

Real Madrid did not publish said result on its website. He just said that they had won the game. That week another team from their youth academy won 19-0. Hits like this continue to happen without the Federation doing anything.