Last Saturday I was in the stands to watch the Athens Youth Football League match.

The young players from the teams of the two neighboring municipalities took to the field for the usual warm-up, which … the fans – overwhelmingly parents and friends – did in the stands with laughter, a few scattered slogans and colored banners.

A truly idyllic football atmosphere. An idyll, of course, until the referee’s first kick, which you think… metaphysically, turned on an invisible switch in the heads of – up to this point – the happy football fans (?) in the stands.

From the first to the last minute of this match, most parents (unfortunately, many mothers) hung on the railing separating the podium from the playing field, obscenely scolding opponents, referees, their own children (many times), who encouraged to execute … by the death of the one who committed the “crime” by circling them or marking them more vigorously.

“Break your legs if he walks past you again, what did I tell you?”, his father screamed out of himself, and behind her mother giggled, enjoying … the moment. And what if the referee had threatened to send him off, and what if the coaches had turned their heads and were indignant? They kept spewing hatred towards the high school students who had their pulses racing at red, and he really didn’t want any of them to give in to those nefarious urges and become evil.

And when the match was decided, in fact, long before it ended, there were some kind of mini (fortunately) skirmishes between these parents, and the minority of the stands remained with their mouths open, of course, not for what they saw inside the playing field.

Indeed, when the referee blew the final whistle, the losing players received an extensive hate speech, a flood of rejection from their own parents, so that next time they “played like men, not like girls …” And the winners, they were rewarded with flattering comments containing lots of sexist clichés.

Recently, the level of bullying at school has changed … for the worse: the state again demonstrates its neurotic reflexes, and we all exhale, probably with relief and the thought: “Fortunately, such things do not happen in our school.” But how long?

Violence, vulgarity and “fakeness” tend to become “culture” and what we see and hear in schools and playgrounds is the tip of the iceberg. The rest looms large… under the surface: in houses behind closed doors and walls.

Teenage souls are “poisoned” by hatred without any filter, the role of which should be played first of all by the parent and close family environment. And again, football reminds us that this is not a “product” that came from … space.

Ninety minutes of a match between high school students was enough to reveal situations that partly explain what is happening in schools. Situations that should worry us much more…