My son doesn't want to play football in the yard

My son doesn't want to play football. Said like that, it seems an insignificant sentence. But, in reality, it is a profoundly political sentence. Because in many schools, even today, not wanting to play football is equivalent to placing oneself outside the center of childhood masculinity. And this has social, emotional, and identity consequences that adults often minimize because we have normalized a structure that we consider "natural" when, in fact, it is cultural and profoundly exclusionary.The problem is not football. Football is a collaborative, physical and creative game. The problem is its cultural monopoly within male childhood. The problem is when it stops being an option and becomes an implicit social obligation. When it starts to function as a mechanism of hierarchization and belonging to the group. When the schoolyard is organized around a single activity that occupies the central space and knowing the names of players, teams and transfers becomes a kind of mandatory male literacy. The child who does not participate in this code is immediately perceived as strange.In many schools, a scene is still repeated that we should look at critically, which is that of boys occupying the center of the playground with football and girls being relegated to the margins. It is a profoundly ideological distribution of space. The center belongs to the male competitive game and the periphery is reserved for activities considered secondary. And it is even more serious when boys who do not fit into this footballing masculinity end up being expelled from the dominant group.It is inevitable to recall Pierre Bourdieu here, who explained how many forms of domination do not function through explicit prohibitions but through the naturalization of habits. The schoolyard is a perfect example, as it is the place where children learn, without anyone verbalizing it, what type of masculinity is valued and what is marginal. Whoever masters this language gains recognition and centrality; whoever does not share it is displaced. Michel Foucault also insisted that power acts through daily micro-practices that shape behaviors. No one formally forces children to play football, but collective pressure produces a subtle, enormously effective discipline.

Then comes the phrase that many children hear too soon: “This child is strange”. “Strange” because they prefer to draw, read, dance, observe insects, or simply not compete. “Strange” because they don’t live football as a collective religion. And this is where school, which often boasts about working on diversity, reveals its contradictions. We can have cultural weeks about inclusion and fill documents with words like co-education, but then we get to the playground and everything continues to function according to extraordinarily traditional schemes.The philosopher Judith Butler showed that gender is performed through a series of repeated acts that society constantly validates. The boy who plays football and shares certain masculine codes receives social approval; the one who does not is perceived as a deviation from the expected model.There is a silent violence in all this. It is not that of insults or physical aggression, but that of invisibility: that of the child who spends recess alone, who tries to fit in and doesn't know what the others are talking about, or who ends up approaching the group of girls because the dominant male group has already expelled him. The thinker bell hooks explained how many boys are educated in a masculinity based on competition, control, and emotional repression.We like to think that we have made great progress on gender issues, but childhood remains extraordinarily segregated and football continues to act as a ritual of normative masculinity. Not participating has profound emotional consequences. When a boy understands that to be accepted he must perform a masculinity that does not feel his own, he learns a dangerous lesson: that social integration depends on personal renunciation.Debates surrounding education are accumulating in Catalonia. Even so, or perhaps taking advantage of this occasion, perhaps the time has come to ask ourselves what model of childhood coexistence we are building. If we want truly inclusive schools, abstract discourses about diversity are not enough. We must rethink playgrounds, diversify games, and stop considering football as the natural axis of childhood masculinity. Because the problem is not that some children play football. The problem is that too often it seems there is no place for those who do not want to play it.