"Children have to learn to play; copying the model of the elders is a mistake"

Disproportionate goals have been common in youth football since time immemorial.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
21 October 2022 Friday 01:34
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"Children have to learn to play; copying the model of the elders is a mistake"

Disproportionate goals have been common in youth football since time immemorial. What is less frequent is that a club apologizes as Gimnástica Segoviana did after endorsing Club Deportivo Carbonero 34-0 in a junior game last weekend.

"We do not like this result. We apologize to Carbonero for an unnecessarily bulky marker that collides with the idea of ​​what basic sport has to be. We will work so that it does not happen again," the Castilian club published on their social networks. The tweet spread like wildfire and the debate about what to do when these types of results occur is reopening.

To avoid them, the federations have been introducing modifications to the regulations in recent years, although there are still leaks. The most popular sports tend to limit victories in order to avoid humiliation at ages when the priority should be learning to play.

“The sports career has several phases: initiation, development, improvement and high performance. At the bases they are copying the competition model of the elders, the one from the last stage, and that is a mistake”, explains Xesco Espar for this newspaper. The high-performance expert criticizes that "you only think about the winners, never about the child who loses."

Measurements vary by sport. In Catalonia, in the case of football, it is limited to 7-a-side football up to junior age (12 years). In 2020, the Catalan Football Federation (FCF) approved that the maximum difference in the scoreboard can never exceed ten goals. When you make the jump to football 11, it is already possible to run into disproportionate results.

The situation is worse in futsal, since no measures are taken in any category by decision of the clubs themselves. On two occasions in the convention of the entities, the FCF has proposed, without success, to close the scoreboard. "They want the real result to be respected," they point out from the Catalan entity.

In other sports, such as basketball, up to cadet (16 years old) the record is closed when the difference between teams exceeds 50 points. They stop counting, although you have to put an asterisk. In the highest level leagues of all categories, the final result is recorded in the minutes, with a view to qualifying for the Spanish championships.

Something similar happens in Catalan handball, except with the smallest. These play four quarters and there is a winner in each one of them, without accumulating goals (points are only distributed for quarter won and they are added at the end). When they are somewhat older (even children), future goals are no longer shown on the scoreboard when the difference is greater than 25. Of course, the total goals for and against are recorded, also thinking about the classification.

“It is a perversion to tie the tie on goal difference, this happens in the Champions League. It causes them to get angry with small teams”, laments Espar. According to the former Barça handball coach and current INEFC teacher, alternatives should be found, such as playing a tiebreaker match if they have the same points. "No matter how much pedagogy the coach does, if winning or losing depends on the goals they score, they will go for the maximum. That's why there have to be limits".

Espar maintains that, after all, in these matches neither team wins. "If you score 34 goals in an hour you practically only shoot, there is no game. Nobody ends up playing". That is why it is important that the coaches of the teams that will win "make it difficult" to win when they already have a considerable income of goals, "to work the team more". A couple of examples would be not allowing a player to score two goals in a row or forcing the ball to be touched by everyone before going for the goal.

The speaker also insists on the importance of learning and denies that it is about overprotection. "For those who say 'life is hard' you have to remind them that they are children. At that age you have to play to have fun, not to win." In the socialization process, therefore, the attitude of the parents is essential. "Parents have to understand that they take their children to be educated, they do sports at school age. When they take them to English they don't think they will have the future Nobel Prize for Literature at home. On the other hand, when they go to football they want it to be Messi".

For this, language and the way of communicating are also very important. Xesco Espar has two Olympic daughters (water polo players Anni and Clara Espar) whom he assures that he never pressured when they were little. "The first thing she would ask him was, 'Did you have a good time? Are you happy with how you did?' And she did not ask them if they had won, but what they had done. It is not only worth winning, but also losing. So the following questions are others ".