The shocking story of LF, a 16-year-old goalkeeper who received a beating in a youth game in El Prat: "If he doesn't protect himself, they will break his head"

«I didn't do anything different. The game ended, I went to the center of the field, shook hands with the other team's players and was going to the locker room when they kicked me from behind at knee level. I hadn't noticed anything before. I fell to the ground. And several of them started kicking me all over my body. By instinct I covered my head with my hands, but I stopped understanding what was happening, I opened my eyes and saw everything black. Until a few minutes later I couldn't move. “My coach and my parents came to help me, but he was stunned for a while.”

LF, 16 years old, plays one more league, a league like any other, Group 27 of the Second Youth Division of Catalonia. He is the goalkeeper of the current leader, Colegio Sagrat Cor de Sarrià in Barcelona, and one of the teams with the fewest goals scored. Until January 27, he simply had fun playing soccer. He enjoyed his sport “since he was little” and was with his friends, without any further pretensions, focused on passing his first year of Baccalaureate and heading toward some Engineering.. But that day he suffered an attack on the field that he still cannot understand today.

«After finishing the match, young fans of the local team entered the field and attacked players from the visiting team, causing the Sagrat Cor goalkeeper to end up badly, with several kicks to the head.. I have only managed to appreciate a player from the local team, LP, kicking him. Subsequently, the public forces were notified,” says the match referee in a cold but precise report.. According to witnesses, on the field of the Barcelonista Terlenka Club, in El Prat, just after the final whistle “between 10 and 12 people” jumped from the back onto the field to hit the Sagrat Cor players and ended up hooking the goalkeeper.. They beat him with the help even, as the referee recorded, of a local soccer player.. Sagrat Cor's last minute goal to take the 1-2 victory was the excuse for the attack.

“When they scored, my son celebrated by clenching his fists and I heard someone from the stands yell at him: 'Don't celebrate because now I'm going to break your legs.'. We didn't pay attention to him, but later…. When I got to him after the beating, he was shaking, it was horrible.. It could have been a death in the field. If he doesn't protect himself, they break his head, they kill him,” denounces the goalkeeper's mother, Patricia, who details the damage report.

Complaint to the Mossos

In addition to several cranial hematomas, LF. He has a broken thumb on his right hand, which will not only prevent him from playing for several weeks, it will also prevent him from following his classes normally and taking the insulin he needs as a diabetic.. A part of the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu de Esplugues confirms the injury and is the basis of the complaint that the goalkeeper's family has filed against LP, the local footballer who participated in the beating. The sports procedure, however, is already closed. According to what was recorded in the minutes, the Catalan Football Federation imposed three games behind closed doors on the CB. Terlenka and eight match sanctions for the aggressor in question. Nothing else. Although Sagrat Cor claimed and stressed that the Mossos already performed in another game for the same team this season.

«We are collaborating with the Mossos and the sanctioned kid is not coming to train. What he did is serious, but he is a 16-year-old boy, we cannot sentence him,” says José Sandoval, director of Terlenka, but the victim, LF. would not you agree. “Whoever hit me will be able to play before me and will also be able to be in the second leg.”. After all, this year we are going to meet again on a soccer field. “I don't understand it,” he says.

All attacks in football

What happened to him is another example of the scourge that dirtyes football, that blackens its atmosphere from the elite to the lower categories.. The data is alarming and, despite the campaigns, it is not improving. According to the Civil Guard count for the State Commission against violence, racism and xenophobia and intolerance in sport, in the 2018-2019 season, the last one with data, there were agents in 9,118 non-professional matches, 6,362 football matches. and 2,756 from other sports and almost all the incidents recorded, 98.8%, were in football. Specifically, they performed in 174 matches and only two were from another sport, basketball.. Most of the time (107) they had to protect the referee, although there were also many attacks between spectators (45) and, as in the case of LF, from spectators to players or vice versa (20).

The annual summary of the National Sports Office of the National Police, which only acts in professional events, also shows similar numbers: last season, 2021-2022, they expelled 593 spectators from the stands and arrested 93 and everyone was watching soccer.

“I wouldn't have any problems in basketball”

«It is depressing that to play football I have to go through this. “If I went to basketball I wouldn't have these problems,” says the victim, LF, who years ago already left a club to escape from his competitive environment and return to school.. «Me because I love football. If someone signs up just to see how it goes, without so much passion, it won't even last a year.. In every game I receive insults, threats…. “They tell me everything,” he adds, unprotected despite the evolution of the legislation.

According to articles 47 and 48 of the Law on comprehensive protection of children and adolescents against violence, the so-called Rhodes Law, approved in 2021, all the entities involved -federations, clubs…- have three specific obligations: training of professionals who work with children, having a protection delegate and developing protocols that address “discrimination, insults and humiliation in sporting contexts.”

In the majority of cases, none of the three requirements are met and this ends in an aggressive environment, if not violent, and, in the end, in incidents and boredom.. A joint study by the Pablo Olavide University of Seville and the University of Huelva revealed that 40% of adolescents abandon sports between 12 and 14 years old – 48% in the case of girls, 33% of men – and concluded that the main cause was “the impact of the sports environment” on their self-esteem.

«After everything that happened, going to the hospital and to the Mossos to report, we arrived home at 12 at night, we sat on the sofa and I told my son: 'You will make me happy the day you quit football. '”, recalls the mother, Patricia, who, apparently, will not see her wishes fulfilled: “He wants to play again and he will. But he will have to spend a few weeks in rehabilitation and it will be difficult for him to put his hand. “I have already told him that he is free to play again, but I don't want him to share the field with someone who has kicked him in the head.”