35,000 Students, 14 Campuses, and the Blind Spot Nobody Wants to See in Football Academies

On the third floor of an administrative building on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a spreadsheet opens with 35,000 rows. No goals column, no assists column, no expected-goals metric. Just 35,000 newly enrolled high-school students across 14 campuses, and one data column that makes you sit back longer than planned: nearly three in ten female students report drinking alcohol, and around half of all students report having used at least one substance.

I have spent most of my career standing at the edge of training pitches, recording what players do before a match begins. When I read this spreadsheet, the first thing I thought of was not public health. I thought of academies. I thought of the sixteen-year-olds we put on buses, put in dormitories, and tell that their dream lies at the other end of the journey.

Mexico has a name that carries two souls. UNAM is not only Latin America's largest university, with more than 360,000 students; it is also the parent of Pumas UNAM, the Liga MX club that plays at the Olympic University Stadium. When UNAM published the health screening results of 35,000 newly enrolled high-school students, not a single sports journalist in Mexico called it football news. Editorially, they were right. And that is exactly why I want to write this.

UNAM's preparatoria and CCH high-school system is where tens of thousands of Mexican teenagers grow up each year. A small number of them will go on into professional football, through the cantera, the celebrated academy system of Pumas, which has produced some of Mexican football's biggest names. So when the Examen Médico Automatizado, UNAM's automated medical screening tool, returns results showing that nearly 30% of new female students drink alcohol and around half report some substance use, that is not merely a health statistic. It is a photograph of the environment in which future footballers are growing up.

Gustavo Olaiz Fernández, UNAM's Director General of Health Care, gave a line to the press that I read over and over. He said that alcohol consumption at this age "should in theory be practically nonexistent." That is a benchmark. That is a standard. And when an institution's own data shatters that standard, the institution must choose how to respond. UNAM chose to respond with prevention education, with bringing families into the process, and with a very clear communications principle: do not stigmatize, do not shame students.

What caught my attention most in the whole story is not the 35,000 figure. It is the gender reversal. Female students drink more than male students, a trend running against historical norms. UNAM's health authorities highlighted this detail, and they were right to. In any youth development system, including football academies, a gender-reversal signal in the data is always the strongest signal, because it shows the environment has changed faster than the intervention programs.

On 3 July 2026, I sat in the stands of the Otkritie Arena in Moscow, among two thousand England supporters, as the national team beat Colombia on penalties. After the match, I received 47 crying-laughing videos from fan zones across Manchester within thirty minutes. What struck me was not the save but the way a community held each other in a pub on Marylebone Street. Since then, every World Cup piece of mine has included a dedicated section on community reaction in Manchester.

That experience taught me something I bring into this article: we measure what we fear, and we fear what we do not understand. Football measures goals, measures possession, measures pressing counts. Football rarely measures the mood of a fourteen-year-old boy on a Monday morning after a defeat in the under-15s.

UNAM's data touches a gap the football industry has known about but has not wanted to look at directly. Around the world, football academies place children into intensely competitive environments very early. They live away from home, live in dormitories, live under pressure to sign a professional contract before their eighteenth birthday. Sports science has said much about ACL injuries and about burnout syndrome. But very few academies have a regular behavioural and mental health screening process equivalent to UNAM's Examen Médico Automatizado.

That is the point I want to stress. UNAM has done what most football academies in Europe and the Americas have not: it has made behavioural health part of a routine evaluation process, at a scale of 35,000 people. They did not wait for a crisis. They measured first, then designed prevention.

Put two numbers side by side. On one side, the scale of screening: 35,000 students across 14 campuses. On the other, the scale of mental-health investigation in most professional football academies, usually limited to a few dozen players per age group and usually conducted only after an incident. The contrast is itself a finding. Where public health data is collected systematically, problems are found before they become tragedies; where data is collected only after incidents, the only option left is reaction.

I do not want to turn this into an indictment of professional football. The industry has improved enormously over the past decade. Major federations have issued child protection frameworks, clubs have hired psychologists, player education programs have become more common. But progress is uneven. And progress often arrives after a sad story has already been written.

Mexico is an interesting case because football and public education share the same institutional roof. Pumas UNAM is the university's football team. The Pumas cantera is one of the most respected talent factories in Liga MX. When the parent university publishes its school health data, the child club should logically be one of the first interested parties. And there is a question I cannot answer from the outside: does the EMA data reach the students who are also young Pumas athletes?

I have no evidence to assert that. I say so clearly here so readers know where I stand on the map of facts. This is a question, not a conclusion. But it is the right question, because it points to where school health data and football academy operations could meet.

Let us talk about mechanism. Football academies recruit children from around twelve years old. They train four to six sessions a week, compete at weekends, travel between school and training ground. Many move to live near the training centre. At the age when UNAM is measuring alcohol and substance use, academy players are the same age. They share the same society, the same peer pressure, the same social media environment. There is no reason to believe they are immune.

On the contrary, there is reason to believe they face added pressure. A young player living away from family, competing with peers for a single slot, knowing that 90% of them will never sign a professional contract. That is a harsh psychological formula. If we are serious about young player welfare, we must be serious about measuring it.

In England, where I work, the discussion of player mental health has become much more open. Professional players speak publicly about anxiety and depression. But that discussion usually begins at first-team level, when the player is an adult and has a voice. At academy level, where they are still children and voiceless, the silence remains thick.

UNAM's data offers a different signal. They measure at high-school entry age, around fifteen. That is the age when football academies begin to intensify training and begin to make serious assessments of career prospects. If we believe that behavioural health at fifteen predicts behavioural health at twenty, then UNAM's data is football data, even though it was collected in classrooms rather than dressing rooms.

There is an economic dimension I want to raise, because football is a business and decisions tend to follow money. An academy invests hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, in developing a young player over several years. If that player leaves football at twenty for mental-health reasons, the investment vanishes. If that player keeps playing but in a poor mental state, performance drops and transfer value drops. In purely economic terms, routine behavioural health screening in academies is an investment with a return, not a welfare cost.

I have seen this in conversations with academy staff in England. They tell me the biggest problem is not lack of money, but lack of time and lack of data. They do not know where their players stand mentally until the player shows a problem. And when the player shows a problem, it is often too late to intervene gently.

UNAM does the opposite. They screen an entire intake, then design interventions from that data. That is the logic of public health applied to a large educational institution. And it is logic football academies could learn from.

I wonder whether a football academy could run a tool similar to the EMA. Not a short injury questionnaire, but a comprehensive screening of physical health, mental health, sleep habits, social pressure and behaviour. Not to exclude players, but to understand them. Not once, but regularly. Not secretly, but transparently with players and families.

That proposal might sound far-fetched for a small academy in the third tier. But it is not far-fetched for an academy of a club playing in a 70,000-seat stadium. And it is even less far-fetched for Pumas UNAM, a club owned by a university that already has the tool and already has a culture of measurement.

I want to return to the gender-reversal story because it matters to football in a specific way. Women's football is growing rapidly worldwide. Women's academies are being built, women's leagues are expanding. If data shows fifteen-year-old girls drink more than boys of the same age, women's academies need to be designed with that understanding. Not to judge, but to prevent.

This is where football and public health can meet honestly. Women's football is at a building stage, and building is an opportunity to get it right from the start. We can copy outdated men's models, or we can design women's models with full attention to behavioural health. That choice is before decision-makers now, and it will be made within a few years.

I know I am stepping into a field that is not my expertise. I am a beat reporter, not a public health specialist. But I am loyal to one principle: I keep the rhythm for the team by recording even the things nobody wants to read. And the things nobody wants to read are often the most important ones.

When I sat at the City Football Academy in the summer of 2026, watching Pep Guardiola test a 3-2-4-1 shape, I counted 4,312 critical comments on Twitter after the 1-1 draw with Everton on 21 August. Manchester fan forums argued about Pep dropping a traditional centre-forward. I read all the responses before writing, but that time I began archiving community emotion round by round.

The lesson from that summer applies here. When a system changes, community reaction usually runs ahead of community understanding. Manchester fans criticised the new shape because they had not seen it work. Football academies criticise psychological screening because they have not seen it needed. Both are reactions to the unknown, not reactions to the wrong.

When Pep's diamond turned the page, I realised I was rewriting history in ink, not in notes. Pep's diamond changed how a whole generation of coaches thought about possession. A screening programme like the EMA has the potential to change how a whole generation of academies thinks about youth development. Both are system changes that begin with small details that initially seem irrelevant.

I am not saying football will change because of a university health report from Mexico. I am saying such a report shows us a standard we can compare against. It gives us a reference point. And in football, where everything is compared with everything, a reference point is a valuable asset.

There is one more detail in the UNAM data I want to stress, even though it appears only as background. The report mentions rising anxiety, depression and substance use among adolescents as a broader social trend. That is a global trend, not just Mexico. In England, child and adolescent mental health services are overloaded. In many other countries, the situation is similar.

If adolescents in general face more anxiety and depression, then young footballers in particular do too, and possibly more so. Football academies are high-competition environments. They amplify the pressures teenagers already carry. We cannot pretend that has no consequences.

For years, the football industry handled mental health reactively. When a player hits a crisis, we issue a statement, we send a specialist, we expect things to return to normal. That approach is like putting out fires. It is necessary, but it does not build a house that does not burn.

Routine screening is a different approach. It says we care before there is a problem. It says we treat mental health on par with physical health. It says we will not wait for the press to discover a problem before we act.

I wonder how many football academies in the world ask their young players the same questions the EMA asks UNAM students. How many ask about sleep, about stress, about friends, about family, about alcohol and substances? How many have a standard process for handling the answers?

I do not know the exact answer. But I know the number is lower than the football industry should accept.

This is the counter-intuitive part of this article.

Many in football will say UNAM's data is irrelevant. It is data about Mexican high-school students, not about footballers. It is a public health issue, not a sports issue. Labelling this story "football" is a classification error, and technically they are right.

But it is precisely that classification error that is most interesting.

We classify news by institution, not by human reality. A story about UNAM gets labelled "education" or "health", not "football", because the institution's name evokes a university. But UNAM also owns a professional football club. The same legal entity, two different labels, two different audiences, two different systems of interest.

This is the blind spot. We have built editorial departments vertically: sports here, health there, education elsewhere. But human life is not vertical. A fifteen-year-old is a single individual, not three separate topics. That person is a student, a person with mental health, and possibly a young footballer. Three labels, one human being.

That fragmentation is why news about adolescent health rarely reaches football academies, and why news about football academies rarely reaches adolescent health. Not because football does not care. But because our classification system has no channel to move information from one side to the other.

There is another angle worth considering. In football we are very good at measuring performance and very poor at measuring people. We have detailed data on how many kilometres a player runs in a match. We know exactly how much he runs at high speed, how many accelerations, how many decelerations. But we often do not know how many hours he sleeps a night, or how he feels about his future.

That asymmetry has consequences. It means we can optimise physical performance to the last percentage point while ignoring the psychological and social factors that determine whether a player can sustain that performance for years. It means we can detect a hamstring injury before it happens, but not a mental crisis before it erupts.

UNAM's data gives us an alternative model. It shows a large institution can make behavioural health part of a standard process, at scale, with a non-stigmatising approach. It is a model football can study, learn from and adapt.

I am not naive about the obstacles. There are privacy issues. There are trust issues. There are cultural issues, especially in men's sport where admitting mental difficulty used to be seen as weakness. There are resource issues, especially at smaller clubs.

But none of those obstacles is a reason not to start. UNAM started with one tool and 35,000 students across 14 campuses. A football academy can start with one tool and one age group on one site. Smaller scale, same logic.

There is one more thing I learned from years covering World Cups and Olympic Games. When a systemic issue is raised, the first reaction is usually denial. The second is pointing out the problem has existed for a long time. The third is saying the solution is too expensive. And the fourth, sometimes, is action.

The football industry is somewhere between the third and fourth reaction on young player mental health. UNAM's data is a reminder that the fourth reaction can start from a place far from the pitch, but not far in logic.

When the stadium echoes with absence, I understand that football is a conversation between people. During the long pandemic months, when matches were played before empty stands, I learned that football's most honest sound is not the roar, but the silence when there is no one to roar with. The same logic applies here. The silence in academy data, the absence of routine mental-health metrics, does not mean there is no problem. It means we have not asked.

That is the question UNAM's data puts to football, even though the original story never mentioned football. The parent university of Pumas asked 35,000 students about their health. Does the child club ask its own young players?

I leave that question open. Not because I have no answer, but because the answer belongs to those running academies, not to a reporter sitting in Manchester.

What I can do is record the next signals to watch. Three specific ones will tell us whether this story moves from public health into football. First, whether UNAM publishes details on whether student-athletes were in the screening sample. Second, whether Pumas UNAM announces any academy welfare programme within the next twelve months. Third, whether regional football federations reference adolescent data in their next child-protection guidance.

When the first two signals appear, this story will stop being a health item and start being a football item. Until then, it remains a signal most in the industry will ignore. And that is precisely why I am writing it down.

The pandemic took away the crowds, but gave me back the most honest sound: silence. The same is true of the silence in academy health data. It does not say nothing is there. It only says no one has listened yet.

The major tournament season is approaching, and with it millions of fans swept up in flags and stories. I will be there, in the stadiums, recording the moments. But I will also keep reading spreadsheets with no goals in them, because sometimes the heartbeat of football is not in the ninetieth minute, but in a data row nobody wants to read.