One in four students in Spain is a victim of bullyingaccording to the Spanish Association for the Prevention of Bullying in Schools. These data have put LaLiga and its 42 clubs on alert, which under the motto “a team leaves no one alone” are involved in a new project to raise awareness about this social scourge. “It is essential that we give a voice and that our message is to seek equality, protection and generate pure spaces for people who suffer. We must be a reference not only in the football part, but also in our way of understanding life, of taking care of ourselves, of taking care of others and of trying to make a better society,” says Borja Iglesias, RC Celta de Vigo player.
In the last decade, football has been increasing its number of followers. In 2023, attendance at LaLiga matches will remain above 11 million fans, according to Statista. For this reason, clubs consider it so important to use their loudspeaker to give visibility and support to these issues. “We want to use our power of reach to not only address it from those who suffer it or those who exercise it, but to generate collective awareness by talking about the problem of harassment,” says Ángel Fernández, brand director of LaLiga.
All first and second division clubs are involved in the campaign, in one way or another. Some of them carry out dissemination work – taking advantage of their ability to reach – and others collaborate through their individual programs, as is the case of Atlético de Madrid, which through its foundation has been giving talks and training on the subject for three seasons. bullying. “Last year we reached nearly 2,000 children who are in the players’ residence, not counting the external schools we have attended,” says Luis Maicas, project manager at the Atlético de Madrid Foundation.
The purpose of this type of talks is to address the problem through education. The clubs teach children how to act in a bullying situation and instill in them values that have a lot to do with football: unity and teamwork. “What sport generates in children is the awareness that when we run after the ball we are all equal, football makes you equal through the game,” says Carla Pereyra, ambassador of the Atlético de Madrid Foundation and wife of coach Diego Simeone. . Furthermore, to make these talks more attractive to children, there are times when a first team player attends and others when Adelardo Rodríguez, a former soccer player with a long colchonero career, accompanies them to praise the group’s values. “They are always working on things that are very necessary and that is why I come whenever I can,” says Rodríguez.
Although football is a great incentive to attract the attention of young people, the truth is that it takes a backseat when these projects are developed. Isabel Gutiérrez, psychologist at the Atlético de Madrid Foundation, assures that, once the talk progresses, boys and girls forget about football and focus on bullying, even when they go to school. “Football catches their attention, but then they forget. There are students who don’t like this sport so much and end up being the most participatory in the conversation. In the end, we enter into the pure and simple content of the bullying”, he comments.
Another of the clubs that already gave workshops and talks from its organization is Getafe CF. The head and coordinator of the club’s grassroots football, Eugenio Mancha, assures that they go hand in hand with LaLiga in this new campaign and highlights the figure that the club already had in place. “We have an action policy that mediates and acts if there is a harassment situation within any Academy team. If we see that there is a child who is having a bad time or who is being treated differently, we check what is happening and we act,” he says.
LaLiga agrees with these two clubs in the importance of raising awareness, preventing and educating children regarding bullying. “We intend real actions to try to minimize this impact and collaborate by offering our tools,” says Fernández, brand director of LaLiga. Carla Pereyra supports this idea: “We have many children, from many social classes and very different, so we have a responsibility that goes beyond the sporting limit.”
Beyond the collaboration with the clubs, LaLiga gives talks on its own to address bullying in educational centers. The first to receive this course was the Federico García Lorca School, in Boadilla del Monte (Madrid). There, the soccer player César Azpilicueta participated in a workshop with around twenty children. Olga de la Fuente, director of the LaLiga Foundation, describes football as a tool for social intervention. “We wanted to fight to find those safer and more respectful spaces for our children and achieve that more fair, inclusive and egalitarian society,” insists De la Fuente.
The role of the aggressor
Although the most important thing is to help the victim, identifying a bullying situation and understanding why the aggressor does it is also crucial in this project. “I think this is the part where we need to intervene the most. Obviously, creating a safe space for people who suffer from it is essential, but we must intervene from prior education, try to send these messages and, above all, make the aggressors see that it is not the way, that they are not helping themselves or not even to themselves,” says Borja Iglesias.
The centerpiece of the campaign bullying launched by LaLigaand which is within the LaLiga VS project, represents the aggressor through a monster that appears on a school soccer field berating a student. At the end of the video it is shown how, thanks to the team’s unity, the children manage to appease him. The project is about that, about working as a team and helping those who need it, so that, together, the little ones grow up in a safe environment free of hate, inside and outside of football.
