Football and Values: What Sport Can Still Transmit, Far From the Stadiums

Everyone can play football. With or without cleats, all you need is a ball to have fun. That's precisely why it's one of the most practiced sports in the world: its cost is almost zero, its rules can be learned in five minutes, and its field can be any flat surface. Originally, men's football is a popular sport, a carrier of cooperation, effort, and respect for rules. As a team sport, the collective takes precedence and the common goal counts more than individual victory.

But one day, something changed. Passion transformed into a market, players into financial assets, and clubs into brands. Young talents are spotted earlier and earlier, valued, transferred, and monetized. Behind the pleasure of the game, industry has settled in with its economic stakes, its performance logic, and its excesses. Today, there are two footballs: the popular game, a carrier of solidarity, and on the other hand, a globalized industry that sometimes seems to have sold its soul.

It is in this space of tension that the project Fútbol y Valores is born, and the story of Mauro Amato, a former Argentine professional player who chose to give football back its original meaning: to reconnect people rather than manufacture players.

This is exactly the type of initiative that Regenerative Initiatives seeks to document and highlight: practices where sport becomes a tool for care, inclusion, and reconnection with the living world. Mauro's approach is a concrete and inspiring example of this.

When the Body Becomes Capital: The Industrialization of Football

Behind the beauty of the game and the emotion of the stadiums, football has become a universe where the body is capital. Every performance, every sprint speed, every pass statistic is measured, archived, and compared. The player is no longer just a human being who plays; he is a market value.

Have you ever heard the story Carlos Tévez tells about his time at Manchester United? When he discovered that Cristiano Ronaldo came earlier than everyone else to train, he wanted to challenge him and show up before him. But when he entered the gym, Cristiano was already there. The next day, Tévez moved up his alarm clock and Ronaldo did too. He never managed to wake up earlier than Cristiano. It's a beautiful story of perseverance, it's true. But it also illustrates how the search for performance has gradually invaded sport, often at the expense of rest and the pleasure of playing.

Mauro Amato sums up this shift in one sentence:

"Today... it's a factory for making footballers. The kids are numbers."

This constant monitoring of the body shapes a culture of absolute performance, and failure no longer has its place. Mauro regrets this:

"Winning at all costs... fair play doesn't exist anymore... I became disillusioned with football, it's no longer pure."

Researchers like Jasmin Peco (The Commercial Aspect of Football, 2023) speak of a sport now bureaucratized, where the profitability of the body takes precedence over the pleasure of playing. Vaughan et al. (2022) add that this obsession with individual performance stifles collective learning and feeds permanent rivalry.

This hyper-competitive model goes even further in its excesses, and the effects of this commodification don't stop at club borders. Indeed, when the body becomes capital, it attracts speculators. Thousands of young people around the world are recruited by unscrupulous agents, sent abroad with the hope of a professional career. Many end up abandoned, without contracts or resources. The ISS Africa report, Going for Gold (2021), describes this phenomenon as modern sports trafficking: the search for the next prodigy fuels a parallel market where dreams become merchandise.

Thus, the competitiveness of world football is no longer limited to the field: it extends to bodies, trajectories, and lives. The sport that was supposed to unite sometimes ends up fracturing.

Educational Football: How to Put the Collective Back at the Center of the Game?

Faced with this logic of individual performance, Mauro Amato chose a simple, almost radical counter-proposal in his context: reward the collective goal, not the result.

In his sessions within a detention center for young people in La Plata, Argentina, the only prize that exists (extra juice boxes) goes to the group that scored the most beautiful team goal. Not to the best player and not to the winning team either. This shift away from the result is a pedagogical method rather than a rule of the game. By removing victory as the sole horizon, Mauro creates conditions for different motivation—what sports psychology researchers call intrinsic motivation, at the heart of self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985): the pleasure of playing, the sense of belonging, and autonomy take precedence over the external pressure of results.

Football then becomes, in his own words, "el vehículo"—that is, the vehicle through which everything else becomes possible: cooperation, trust, and relationship.

At the beginning of everything is love and affection expressed through concrete practices: entering each room to greet everyone before starting, knowing all 30 names, making eye contact, giving a hug rather than shaking hands.

« L'ingrédient principal, c'est le premier des valeurs : l'amour. Tout naît de là. » 

This approach is part of what philosopher Nel Noddings theorized as the ethics of care: an educational relationship founded on attention to the other, reciprocity, and responsibility for the bond.

Mauro doesn't claim to apply a fixed method. He himself says he doesn't have a formalized methodology, building each session based on what the group returns to him: "I surf the wave." Where the football industry imposes protocols, he adapts.

When Football Becomes a Tool for Social Inclusion: Concrete Effects

A year and a half after the workshops began, signs of transformation are visible, and not just according to Mauro. The teachers at the facility have noticed it too: on session days, "the population is calm, it is peaceful." An informal observation, but a significant one: football played in this context produces a sense of calm that spreads beyond the "cancha" (the field) and diffuses into the institutional environment.

The reduction in violence is the most tangible change. During the first sessions, matches followed the law of the strongest: repeated fouls, insults, or a monopolized ball. Gradually, by setting clear limits and valuing solidarity over domination, Mauro saw behaviors evolve.

"Hay menos violencia" ("There is less violence")

he repeats it, like something obvious that still amazes him. These effects align with what social psychology research calls prosocial motivation or the disposition to act for the good of the group rather than for one's own interest (Grant, 2008).

Beyond the matches, profound transformations are also taking place: on rainy days, when the session is canceled and Mauro and the young people find themselves inside, conversations open up. Spontaneously and unexpectedly, some young people talk about their history, their regrets, and their desire for a different life.

According to Mauro, one of the most powerful moments remains the trip to the stadium. Six young people were able to attend an Estudiantes de La Plata match, a first for each of them. On the way back, in the minibus stopped in front of the facility, one of them declared that he couldn't believe he was returning there: "They were experiencing another reality." This moment reveals something essential: accessing an ordinary experience—watching a match, eating a hot dog in a park—can, in certain lives, become an act of rupture and hope.

Football and Values: A Replicable Model for Other Contexts?

The Fútbol y Valores workshop didn't remain confined within the walls of Instituto Legano. Its reputation began to circulate in the complex, which houses seven facilities on the same site. Other structures expressed the wish to welcome the program.

The next step is already in preparation: a large-format football field, long abandoned, could be restored to host meetings with outside clubs. The idea is to allow young people to match themselves against other teams within a framework structured by the program's values and to open, perhaps, concrete perspectives for life after release.

That's precisely where Regenerative Initiatives sees replication potential. Not to copy a model, but to extract a philosophy: sport as a space for care, connection, and meaning, in contexts where exclusion takes multiple forms. Mauro's approach has no fixed methodology, and that's also what makes it transferable—from a neighborhood club to a detention center, from one city to another.

We sometimes forget that football, before becoming an industry, was free entertainment, collective, accessible to everyone. That's precisely the football that Mauro Amato went to put back into play by giving it meaning.

In a penitentiary facility on the outskirts of La Plata, where few educators dare to venture, football has become what it should never have ceased to be: a space for encounter, shared effort, and dignity. A place where one learns to look at the other, to uphold a rule, to win together or not to win at all.

What Regenerative Initiatives tries to document through this story is proof that regenerative practices in sport are not utopian: they exist, they work, and they produce real transformations in bodies, behaviors, and perspectives. When conceived as a tool for care and connection rather than as a machine for performance, sport can reach people whom institutions struggle to touch.

The question posed by Fútbol y Valores is therefore not technical. It is political: what football do we want to pass on? And to whom?