“In what other profession do you have to endure being criticized like that for trying to do your job?” | LALIGA VS

The old stigma is dead. Psychology today is another part of the daily work of the elite athlete, the tool with which they train their mind to be able to face, not only the extreme demands of competitive football, but also, unfairly, the hatred they receive “only for doing their job”, as Valencia CF coach Rubén Baraja explains in this ninth episode of LALIGA VS. There is no other profession in which such newbies are so exposed, explains the myth in his talk with the president of the Spanish Federation of Sports Psychology—and also a soccer coach—David Peris Delcampo: “People may think that It doesn’t influence a player if you make comments to him, and I’m not telling you to mess with his skin color or his physical appearance, do you know what it means to simply criticize his game? They are very young, emotionally immature kids, some of them don’t even have a driving license yet and are already professional players! And yet people go and, because of a mistake in a game, they get crushed.”

Baraja works daily in his coaching staff with a psychologist, a figure that is always present and to whom the members of the squad can turn for personal or professional advice. His role is fundamental to improving performance. He teaches them how to stay focused, how to keep a clear mind even though there are 50,000 people shouting from the stands during games, or how to recover from a mistake so that the pressure doesn’t make you repeat it. His criteria are taken into account even for matters such as communication between the coach and his players: “Sometimes I ask him for advice on how to convey a message,” says Baraja, knowing that no two personalities are the same, and what a footballer can serve as motivation for another, it can have the opposite effect. “Before all these issues fell on the coach, now, luckily, we have more figures to help. It is without a doubt a great advance.”

Social networks, youth and hate

During matchday 27, the Spanish-Dominican player Peter Federico, who had recently joined Valencia CF, experienced a very unpleasant episode. Social networks were filled with racist comments against him after the outstanding match he played against his former team, Real Madrid. “I didn’t realize that night, it was the next day when the messages started to arrive.” His reaction was to close the comments on his account so that only his friends could interact with him. A mature response, in the opinion of expert Peris Delcampo, but one that leads his coach, Baraja, to ask himself: “Why do we have to endure this? Why do we have to admit that someone picks on him while he is doing his job because of the color of his skin or because he is right or left-handed? I always tell them to try to have a calm life, because these things can affect you, even if he knew how to manage it so well.” An example of what should be a lesson for everyone: we must banish hatred from the fields, from the networks and from society.

The Monitor for the Observation of Hate in Sports

LALIGA has developed a tool that independently monitors the conversation on social networks and audits the level of hatred and racism spread around Spanish professional football: one more step in its efforts to detect and eradicate violence and hate speech in football and in society. Every day and using a semantic engine with more than 50,000 linguistic rules and artificial intelligence algorithms, MOOD tracks up to 800,000 messages, calculating metrics that allow the fan to evaluate the progress of our football in this fight week by week.