How Soccer Teaches Living Values that Will Help You in Your Life

It is a talent factory, but also an advanced course for all those situations you will find after the adolescence. La Masia is a place where emotions play a critical role. Chosen teenagers all around the world with a common objective, coexisting and being trained to become top soccer players, although reality says there is not enough room for all. What does this means?

Obviously, success and defeat are always together, and in this game, they have opposite consequences. When we talk about teenagers, the scene may remind a dramatic movie; broken dreams and unfulfilled hopes aren’t a good mix in a young boy’s head. The future is success or defeat, happiness or frustration. However, in the passage of the road, there are countless valuable lessons that will mark the personality of this group of guys who live in La Masia. We live lots of unforgettable moments, but those where you want to disappear make a difference in their education. Without any doubt, some of them remain in their memories for the rest of our lifes.

From a physical perspective, playing soccer means health. Routines and nutritional habits involving training and competitions are one of the best ways to grow healthier, stay focused and forget bad habits. We need to live as soccer players 24 hours a day, and it is imperative to create those good habits from the childhood in order to find success in the future.

Eric Abidal, a great example of the values that soccer represent

The business is an important part of the story, but not necessarily the most important. Big human relations grow between these walls, and it is very common to see homegrown players inviting the foreign ones to their homes in special dates like New year’s Eve. Sometimes friendship brings you the chance to meet another family many miles away from home, this kind of examples show us how human relations can be developed also in high pressure environments like high performance centers.

From that perspective, I can say that me and that little group of chosen kids were being formed not only as players, but also as persons, and that is exactly what this article is about, the way that soccer can form and educate future generations.

<click to Tweet> It is very common to see homegrown players inviting the foreign ones to their homes in special dates like New year’s Eve.

Everybody knows how important are the values that sports introduce in our society, not only but specially in young people. Collective sports are the best place to learn many values that kids will use in their future, no matter where they work or where they live, collective sports always gonna be the easiest way to introduce the values that we want to see in our kids. The great part of this story is that nobody gonna show them, they will discover by themselves through dealing with new situations and interacting with other kids, coaches, supporters, etc.

In order to coexist during many years with the same people far away from home kids develop an uninterested friendship which will help them to develop their future personal relationships. Those must be based in empathy, respect and fidelity, very important values learned coexisting with young people in your same circumstances.

Soccer, as every sport, has a short memory, we all know that sports player value depends on the performance of his last game, going from the heaven to the hell fastest than in any other job. Obviously this is difficult to accept for everybody, and puts a lot of pressure over kids, but it also shows them how to deal with stress situations and how to find a good mental balance, which is a great lesson for their future, whatever work or objective a person has. Work under pressure is a routine for most sports players and to be able to deal with those situations must be considered as a big success.

Messi suffer this pressure in 2014. He worked hard to defeat the pressure.

Although there is not enough space in professional soccer for everybody, individual objectives must not be on the table to get collective success, which only will arrive with solidarity and collective effort. This is a very important key for all those guys who will be a part of a teamwork, specially when we are talking about big companies. In Barcelona Soccer Excellence we improve those individual skills that will benefit collective success, every player needs to put their best on the table in order to help their mates to get a high performance.

Patience and constancy are unusual virtues in young people. New generations want to get their goals immediately, and the lack of those two virtues, patience and constancy will create defeat and frustration.

Anxiety stops people who tries to develop their dreams. An early education learning to keep pushing ourselves even in tough situations is a valuable tool for the rest of our life. As Barcelona Soccer Excellence shows in their training methodology excellence is a consequence of constant and long term work; we should remember that it is not an act, it is a habit.

As we all know, global development has created some new situations that society hasn’t learned to deal with yet. Nowadays there are no borders; we live, play, work and socialize with people coming from different countries, cultures, social situations, religions, colours,…but incomprehensibly, we still can’t manage those situations to live together.

This is probably one of the few things we can’t show them, one of the few things that teenagers can teach us. Collective sports are, without any doubt, the strongest social integration tool that we have in our society, and it is also the best and the only way to introduce to kids some values that are not always present in adult people. Play with kids coming from everywhere and interact with them is a great lesson for future generations, and probably the most important thing we can learn playing collective sports; we shouldn’t forget that those kids will be our future doctors, lawyers, politicians,…They will manage our society as actual adults do today.

Many of the multiple values we want to introduce in our kids have been written in this article. They seem, too many lessons to learn but the best part is that kids won’t be even conscious about how important those lessons will be in their future. Adults just need to make sure that we provide them the chance to keep playing, keep enjoying,…and keep learning.