Santi Cazorla Helping Us to Take Football Beyond Borders for Troubled Youngsters

On Feb. 14, 2013, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Chris Grayling, announced in a Green Paper that it costs anywhere between £100,000 to £200,000 to keep a youngster under the age of 18 in a youth offenders’ institution.

Of the 1,000-plus young people behind bars, 88 percent of the boys and 74 percent of the girls had been excluded from school at some point, and nearly three-quarters of them reoffend on leaving custody.

It costs just £485 to put everything in place for a youngster on the Football Beyond Borders scheme, which has been launched in London and is now looking to go nationwide.

I am proud to be a patron of FBB, an organisation that looks to help and mentor young people who, for whatever reason, have slipped, or are on the verge of slipping, through life’s net. These are youngsters close to being expelled from school, or in gangs, or on a collision course where eventual incarceration in a young offenders' institution looks the most likely outcome.

We start by identifying problem areas, then the schools and then the most confrontational youngsters for whom time is running out.

We are going to educate them not with love, but an extracurricular programme that can give these young people a learning interest in any subject through the medium that so many of them love—football.

Work is followed by a one-hour training session based not on skills, but rather the collective effort, with emphasis on working as a team, not an individual.

Matt Dunham/Associated Press

I am also immensely proud to welcome on board with us the wonderful Santi Cazorla, who has also agreed to become an FBB patron and spokesman, and who was with us at our recent fundraising night.

At the event, we made in excess of £16,000, courtesy of an auction that included signed memorabilia from the Arsenal midfielder and the dubious distinction of having lunch with yours truly—a "treat" somebody thought was worth paying £550 for. I’m flattered, if a little surprised.

Much is made of the champagne lifestyle Premier League footballers enjoy. While Cazorla is now in a privileged position, few people know better than him the loneliness and isolation young people can endure even when living a life that many might envy.

Born in Llanera, a small Asturian town about 20 kilometres from the province’s capital, Oviedo, it was as a 17-year-old that he left his beloved Asturias and family for Villarreal some 500 miles away.

Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty Images

Having settled there, he was sold to Recreativo Huelva in the south before being bought back by Villarreal, then sold again—this time to Malaga—when the club needed to balance the books.

A similar fate awaited him at Malaga, who sold him to Arsenal with a haste that bordered on the indecent, and meant he left a club he would quite happily have spent the rest of his career at without having the chance to say goodbye—an omission he only recently managed to correct, thanks to his many admiring fans.

Now living in London and speaking English, nobody is better qualified to give advice to isolated, marginalised youth.

Kirsty Wigglesworth/Associated Press

He said the most important thing in life is to make the best of every opportunity that comes your way and learn from every obstacle that is put in your path. Don’t waste your chances; "Carpe diem, seize the day."

Secondly, he said that if life had taught him anything, it is that you should remember who you are, where you come from and be humble and happy with what you have, and finally that everyone—no matter what size, shape or colour—had the same rights and the right to be afforded the same respect.

Cazorla has said publicly he will dedicate more time to FBB as, indeed, has Joey Barton, someone who sees in the lives of the youngsters much of his own life story.

Football is a truly powerful force that draws people to it—a force that, if channelled properly, can provide life lessons and skills, create order where there is chaos and instil respect where there was previously contempt.

In his Green Paper, Grayling said (h/t the Guardian):

"

We cannot go on just doing more of the same, pouring more money into a system that doesn’t work in the hope of a different outcome.

That doesn’t make any sense to the taxpayer or to the young people who we should be trying to get back on the straight and narrow.

I want young people to get the education and skills they need to turn their backs on crime for good.

"

Football can—and should—play its part in the process.