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.

Salt is known today for being the municipality with the lowest per capita income in Catalonia. Also one of the towns with the highest concentration of migrant population: nearly 40% of its residents are of foreign nationality. But what headlines have overlooked in recent years is that almost half of this town's surface area is still orchards and pastures. The Monar canal, parallel to the Ter river, marks the border between built-up Salt and the agricultural zone. Few facilities surpass it, except for a large high school built on fertile land. Located on the border with Girona, surrounded by greenery and with magnificent views of the Mare de Déu del Mont, lies Vallvera. A secondary and vocational training center with over 1,200 students inaugurated in 2008, it contrasts with its surroundings as a large gray sheet metal building with a concrete-filled courtyard. "In winter it's a refrigerator and in summer an oven, there's no middle ground!" laments the director, Ferran Maimir, who started this course with a direction very focused on working towards the renaturalization of the courtyard, but with a different method: having the students themselves build the shade with their hands.

For ten years, the Fabra i Coats complex has had a nursery, two schools and a high school, with a total of 1,300 students who have had to deal with the noise of the construction work that is still going on. I worked there for four years. I also lived as a child opposite a high school and I know that it can be nerve-racking. But nothing compares to the flat I am in now: three dogs, a TV playing at full speed until late at night, a newborn baby and fans of experimental music. On some summer nights I have been tempted to go and beg them to turn down the music. And I could do it. What I cannot ask them is to change the record. Coexistence is about this, about time slots. Not about tastes. Because who says that what they hear is noise?