Today’s youth loves luxury. She is poorly educated, despises authority, does not respect her elders, and gossips while she should be working. Young people no longer stand up when older people enter the room.” The phrase could be from yesterday, but it is about 2,400 years old, because it seems to have been uttered by Socrates, the philosopher, not the Brazilian player. Don’t be fooled even though this article corresponds to the sports section. Aristotle, another thinker who emerged from the inexhaustible Greek pool, also scolded the girls. He is credited with the following reflection: “Today’s young people have no control and are always in a bad mood. “They have lost respect for their elders, they do not know what education is and they lack all morals.”

I am afraid that, without serving as a precedent, I am going to contradict Socrates and Aristotle. If these complaints were fair, their transmission from generation to generation would have resulted in young people who today would be amorphous, without physical muscle and brain signal, incapable of moving and reasoning. It is not the case. Our children and our children’s friends, with exceptions, the only thing missing, are smarter and more prepared than we were at their age. If they are addicted to cell phones it is because, as they say, they were born with them and no large technology company deigned to warn them about their dangers. We were more stupid. We got hooked on tobacco, a much more rudimentary dependence, and, knowing what the world was like without cell phones, we have not known how to escape its traps either.

There has been a transformative phenomenon in sport in recent times. The cyclists who previously exploited people in their late twenties and early thirties now do so in their early twenties. There we have Vingegaard, Pogacar or Evenepoel. The athletes, more of the same, with Duplantis and the Ingebrigtsens as clear examples of precocity. Verstappen, in engine, threatens records that others achieved as veterans. The case of Carlos Alcaraz brings us closer… Associated with his premature success, all of them have common elements: spongy mentality when learning new concepts and innate or acquired mechanisms in the face of the very strong environmental pressure that is endured in the elite . Oh, and from allusions (Socrates and Aristotle), it is obvious that they are endowed with morals and behave politely in the world.

At Barça this tendency towards the early consolidation of young people is a reality. From the great Calderé debuting in the first team already hairless and with a mustache in the 80s, there has been an extreme acceleration of the maturation process, with Lamine Yamal making his debut at the age of 15 or Marc Guiu scoring with 17 23 seconds after stepping onto the field First. Then there are Balde, Fermín or Gavi…

For me, young people, I don’t think of criticizing them, but rather admiring them and, obviously, envying them.