There is a confession from Messi that has been doing the rounds lately, and it is worth more for what it reveals about the system than for what it says about him. He said he regrets many things, and in particular not having studied and not having learned English as a child. He said that when he meets certain people he feels, in his own words, half ignorant. And that he always asks his children to study, because football teaches values but is not above education.
This comes from the footballer with the least need on the planet for a backup plan. If he has regrets, it is worth asking what happens to everyone else.
And everyone else is far more numerous than it seems. In the European Union, forty-three per cent of young people between twenty-five and thirty-four have a university degree. Among male professional footballers, the academic literature puts that figure at somewhere between two and five per cent. Compulsory schooling is completed, because the law demands it, but dropout rates spike precisely when the first professional contract arrives, between the ages of seventeen and nineteen.
The temptation is to explain it through money: someone who is going to earn millions does not need a degree. But that explanation falls apart the moment you look at women's football, which demands exactly the same sporting commitment and produces opposite results. Eighty-four per cent of professional female footballers completed secondary school and around thirty per cent hold a university degree. In the German league, almost half are pursuing higher education while competing. They train the same, travel the same, and play the same. What changes is that they know football is not going to pay for the next fifty years of their lives.
That puts the question where it belongs: this is not a problem of ability or time, it is a problem of incentives. And the incentives are badly distributed.
For a club, a footballer is an asset on the balance sheet that is amortised over time. What justifies that investment is immediate results or a profit on a transfer, and anything that is not training, resting or fulfilling commercial obligations is perceived as noise. Nobody needs to ban studying: it is enough for the environment to treat it as a distraction. The sociological literature is quite clear on this point, and documents that coaches interpret academic interest as a lack of commitment. Academies cultivate a single identity, that of footballer, in which considering an alternative is equivalent to admitting in advance that you are not going to make it.
Agents do not help either, and not out of malice. Their income comes from commissions on transfers and contract renewals, operations that happen within windows of a few weeks. Nobody gets paid because their client finishes a degree. The agent's time horizon and that of the footballer at forty bear no resemblance to each other.
And here comes the uncomfortable part. A worker with no alternatives outside their sector negotiates poorly, and that is as true in football as in any other trade. The international players' union has documented how, in the intermediate and lower categories, the absence of career options outside the game pushes players into accepting short contracts, degraded wages and even non-payment, simply because there is nowhere else to go. There is no need to assume a conspiracy: it is enough to note that nobody in the chain benefits from the player having options.
None of this would matter much if the majority ended up making a living from football. But the pyramid is brutal. Of the boys who enter a professional English academy at age nine, less than half a per cent end up earning a living from the sport. And of those who at sixteen secure a training scholarship at a club, five out of six are no longer in professional football by the time they are twenty-one. These are boys of nineteen or twenty, outside the system, holding a sports technical qualification that is barely worth anything on the ordinary labour market and having done nothing else with their lives.
The human cost has been measured. A British study found that more than half of young players released from academies showed clinical levels of psychological distress within three weeks of being told they were being let go. And among professionals, studies by the medical division of the international players' union put the proportion of former footballers experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression at around thirty-five per cent.
Fairness requires acknowledging the other side of the argument, because it has merit. European academy regulations do require education: the English system mandates twenty hours of classroom time per week, the French charter imposes a dual-project contract, and Germany and the Netherlands have set up institutes coordinated with clubs so that young players finish their secondary education. The problem lies in what is being taught, because the vocational sports certifications that are predominantly delivered have low value outside the sport, and the educational administrators themselves acknowledge that players aim for the bare minimum pass.
And there is a physiological argument that deserves not to be dismissed. An experimental study published in a sports medicine journal demonstrated that prolonged mental fatigue impairs the physical and technical performance of footballers: less distance covered, worse shooting accuracy, slower decision-making. With calendars of sixty or seventy matches per season, free hours are needed for recovery. Studying is not impossible, but it is not free either.
What those objections do not explain is why the same calendar allows a female footballer to study but not a male one. Nor why there are verified cases of players who managed it at the very top. Chiellini completed his economics degree and then a master's with distinction in Turin while he was captain of Juventus, and has said he studied during international camp gatherings and negotiated his oral exams around the Champions League fixture list. Rodri graduated in Business Administration while already playing for Manchester City. Juan Mata earned two degrees alongside his time at Valencia, Chelsea and United. These are exceptions, and they are exceptions precisely because they had to swim against the system rather than be supported by it.
The contrast with the United States is the most uncomfortable of all. There, the path to professional sport runs through university, with academic obligations required to maintain eligibility, and nobody considers it a distraction. The model has its own failings, including scandals involving invented courses designed to protect athletes, but it solves one thing well: well over ninety-eight per cent of those who do not make it as professionals leave with a degree.
That is why Messi's words are harsher than they sound. He says he had time and did not use it, and he blames himself. But a sixteen-year-old boy, living in a residence five hundred kilometres from home, with a coach who decides his future and an environment that constantly tells him he must think only about the ball, is not making that decision on equal terms.
The greatest footballer in history regrets not having studied. The striking thing is that football remains organised so that this is still the rational choice.
