35,000 Students, One Health Screening, and What Football Academies Have Not Done

Students were not asked about grades. They were not asked about athletic talent. They were asked about sleep, about sleepless nights, about their first drink, and about anxiety that had lasted for weeks. That is how the Examen Médico Automatizado — EMA — operates at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. On a morning at the start of the school year, at one of the university's fourteen campuses, thousands of students entering high school filled an auditorium to take a screening that carried no score, no ranking, and no entry on any transcript. The results have just been released, and they forced the university's health directorate to speak publicly. About 35,000 students took part. Three in ten female students reported drinking alcohol. Nearly half of all students reported some contact with a substance. Set beside the standard UNAM itself set — that adolescent drinking should be practically nonexistent — the gap cannot be closed by a press release. I read this dataset at midnight in Beijing. The first thing I thought of was not Mexico City. The first thing I thought of was the dressing rooms of football academies I have walked into, where fourteen-year-old children have their height, speed, and heart rate measured every week, but are almost never asked how many hours they slept. UNAM, Pumas, and the single thread linking two stories UNAM is one of the largest universities in Latin America. It runs a preparatory and CCH high-school system across fourteen campuses, admitting tens of thousands of new students each year. It is also the parent institution of Pumas UNAM, a professional club playing in Liga MX. The thread linking this school-health story to football lies there, and only there. The material UNAM published says nothing about football. No player names. No matches. No contracts. No standings. Its subject is high-school students, not professional footballers. That is precisely why it deserves to be read inside football. A football academy is also a school system, except it has a league table and money. Pumas UNAM, like every club with a youth academy, recruits children in exactly the age bracket the EMA screens. And every Liga MX club runs a youth pipeline with hundreds of names attached. Years of following teams taught me something I have rarely written down this bluntly: a club buys more than a player's name. It buys someone's childhood. Every contract is a promise with an expiry date. What the EMA screens, and what it does not The EMA is a screening tool UNAM applies to all incoming students. It collects data on physical health, mental health, and behaviour. The goal is not to rank students, but to design prevention strategy grounded in measurable reality. The notable part is the method. This is self-reported data. Students answer about their own behaviour. This is where my professional principle has to speak before anyone rushes to a conclusion: self-reported data tends to understate reality, especially for behaviours society disapproves of. The real figures may be higher, not lower. I repeat this to editors constantly: numbers do not speak for themselves — people choose how to read them. Gustavo Olaiz Fernández, UNAM's Director General of Health Care, is the programme's authorised voice. He stressed that screening must be carried out without stigmatising students, and that the university must work with families, not only inside the campus walls. The message was delivered by a single, controlled voice, with no leakage of internal friction. This framing deserves recognition. It assigns no blame. It pins no name tag on any child. It builds a prevention framework rather than a disciplinary one. In the sports industry, this is a language we rarely hear. What football screens for at fourteen Football academies around the world screen very carefully. But they screen different things. Predicted height. Stride length. Thirty-metre sprint speed. Decision-making under pressure. VO2 max. Indicators around knees, ankles, hamstrings. At one academy I visited, every young player had a file as thick as a book. It contained every physical metric, updated weekly. It contained exactly one section for mental health, and that section was usually left blank all season. Nobody was ever reprimanded for leaving it blank. But missing a hamstring measurement would trigger an immediate response. The pitch does not lie — but people do. In this case, the thing that lies is the file. It tells us a boy runs thirty metres in 4.1 seconds, but not how many hours he sleeps, what he eats before training, or what he is hiding after training. UNAM does the opposite of that habit. It starts with sleep, anxiety, and behaviour. It does not ask how fast you run. It asks whether you are okay. What makes the UNAM dataset important to football is not the drinking rate. It is that an institution owning a professional club chose to screen behaviour before screening performance. The counter-trend and what it reveals The most striking detail in the report is that female students' drinking rates were high in some groups, higher than some male groups. This runs against the historical norm, in which men typically show higher rates of use. UNAM placed this figure at the centre of its message, and there was reason to. In football, we tend to treat the mental health of male players as a topic for Europe's big leagues. We speak less about young female players, about the pressure a fifteen-year-old girl faces when she must hold a place in a squad while confronting expectations about appearance, family, and the future. Data only keeps the beat — emotion is the singer. A statistic on drinking rates does not sing. It only keeps time for the stories behind it. And the stories behind it are the part a beat reporter must patiently record. I have lived alongside teams to understand why they lose. Most of the defeats I have witnessed did not begin on the pitch. They began weeks earlier, in sleepless nights, in phone calls no one on the coaching staff knew about, in training sessions where a young player only pretended to concentrate. The gap between protection and screening Football likes to talk about protecting young players. Federations issue safeguarding regulations. Clubs sign anti-abuse commitments. Academies hang posters in corridors. These are necessary steps and should not be dismissed. Protection and screening are two different jobs. Protection builds fences against harm from outside. Screening actively searches for harm inside, before it surfaces as an incident, a headline, an apology statement. UNAM did the second. It actively asked 35,000 students about their behaviour rather than waiting for one of them to collapse in a classroom or on a training pitch. That is the difference between a prevention system and a consequence-management system. How many football academies do the same? How many clubs own a tool sensitive enough to detect a fourteen-year-old drinking after training before it becomes a newspaper headline? I have asked this question in many technical meetings, and the answer is usually polite silence. One thing I learned from watching matches across many seasons: teams do not collapse from a lack of talent. They collapse from the things that never make it onto any chart. The counterintuitive view: the enemy is not alcohol The public's first reaction to a report like this is to look at the drinking rate and conclude the problem is alcohol. I think that misorders the priorities, and it repeats almost verbatim inside football. The drinking rate is a symptom. It is what surfaces, easy to measure, easy to count, easy to headline. Behind it lies a longer chain: anxiety, depression, academic pressure, loneliness, and the absence of trusted adults to talk to. Football makes the same mistake. When a young player falls into drinking or gambling, we treat the behaviour. We fine. We suspend. We issue a statement about discipline and consider the story closed. We rarely ask what happened six months earlier. Football academies screen physical condition weekly but screen psychological condition once a season, sometimes never. We know exactly what state a boy's hamstring is in, but not how much he sleeps, what he fears, or who he is hiding. The season is empty, yet the bench still holds a dent where someone sat. The physical traces of erosion always outlast what any spreadsheet captures. A young player who leaves an academy leaves no technical error in the file. He leaves a gap no one can measure, and no one wants to. What the UNAM dataset actually proposes UNAM did not only publish figures. It proposed a direction: work with families, expand prevention programming, and maintain a non-stigmatising principle throughout. This is a structured package of measures. It acknowledges that intervention inside the school is insufficient. It acknowledges that students live in an environment wider than the classroom, and that a single screening is valuable only if a system exists to receive the results. For football, the lesson is structural, not numerical. An academy could screen the behaviour of its young players systematically, periodically, with a clear protocol on how the data will be used and who may access it. The prerequisite is that the player must believe the data will not be used to cut him. This is the hardest boundary in the whole story. A young player in an academy knows that every metric can become a reason to discard him. If you ask him about sleep and he believes the answer will push him out of the squad, he will lie. The dataset then becomes meaningless, no matter how sophisticated the tool. UNAM solves this by separating screening from ranking. The test carries no score. It never appears on a transcript. That is the condition for honest data, and also the thing most football academies have not done. An academy that wants to go this route must accept one thing: mental-health data must not be used in decisions to keep or cut a player. Until that boundary is written down and believed by players, every screening tool will only produce beautiful answers. Signals to track Based on my experience following matches and academies, the next signal worth watching is not at UNAM. It is whether any professional club, starting with Pumas UNAM itself, applies a similar screening tool to its own academy. If that happens, this stops being a school-health item from Mexico. It becomes a milestone in how football treats the children it recruits. A small, quiet milestone, with no grand press conference, but one that could change how a generation of players is cared for. If it does not happen, we will keep knowing exactly what state a boy's hamstring is in while knowing nothing about whether he is okay. We will keep reading datasets full of physical metrics and a single blank field named mental health. In a team hotel, silence is also an official statement. And in football academies, the blank field for mental health has been silent for far too long. They remember the goals — I remember the sigh after the whistle. If there was ever a moment to start listening to that sigh earlier, it is now, when a university in Mexico has just proven that asking 35,000 children whether they are okay is entirely possible. The rest depends on whether some football academy has the courage to ask the same question of the children it holds in its hands.