Mental health alarm 2023/10/11 | Excelsior

• There are already many suicides that are happening among footballers.

In recent years, awareness has become of the importance of psychological support in the performance of athletes. Football, always reluctant to new ideas, has long been loosening its resistance and incorporating a tool whose greatest argument for its implementation is common sense.

Of the ninety minutes plus injury time... how much time is a footballer interacting with the ball and how much time is he thinking? If we imagine that a finalizer like Hugo Sanchez In a game he did not reach two minutes in contact with the ball, and just over three Xaviwhen he monopolized the construction of the game at Barça pep, we understand that the holding period of each player is tiny if we compare it with the almost 100 minutes “thinking”, according to the time that ends up playing currently. But if we add to this the anxiety of the pre-match, the continuous media exposure and the pressures from his environment, how does a twenty-year-old boy manage this mental demand?

High competition already understood that the psychological complements the physical, the technical and the understanding of the game in the global vision of sports performance, however, this approach does not always consider the most important thing of all: the comprehensive mental health of the athlete.

The alarms are many: the multi-medallist Simone Biles He withdrew from Tokyo 2020 for manifesting “demons in his head”, Ricky Rubioan experienced player for the Cleveland Cavaliers, dropped out of the Basketball World Cup to “take care of his mental health,” Noami Osaka He excluded himself from Roland Garros due to the depression and anxiety problems caused by the demands of the circuit, etc.

Football is not immune to this reality either. The statements of Dele Alliconfessing to Gary Neville their problems of depression and addiction to sleeping pills, and the contrasting sensations they experienced From Mary and Renan Lodi after the Argentine triumph at the Maracaná, in the last Copa América. While little angel With his goal he ended his personal ordeal due to the supposed “failures” with the Albiceleste, the Brazilian full-back started his own by failing to score the goal that gave Argentina the victory.

In the world there are already many suicides that are happening among footballers and little institutional awareness. So that this reality does not become a scourge, it is urgent that the State, clubs and federations implement programs that seriously address this challenging problem.

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