35,000 UNAM Students and the Health-Screening Gap in Football Academies

In the most recent intake, nearly 35,000 students entering upper-secondary school at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) sat a test that had nothing to do with grades: a physical, mental-health and behavioural screening questionnaire rolled out simultaneously across 14 UNAM campuses. The result placed before the university's health board: roughly 3 in 10 female students had drunk alcohol, and about half of new-entry students reported using at least one substance. There is no goal, no xG, no PPDA figure in that document. But for someone used to reading data on 15-to-18-year-olds to guess how far a young player will go, this is the kind of dataset I would rather keep than a win.

A screening tool designed before the problem became a headline

UNAM operates a tool called the Examen Médico Automatizado (EMA), an automated medical exam applied to incoming students. Its purpose is not to rank academic ability but to map the physical and mental health of an entire intake cohort, and from there to design intervention programmes. The scale — 14 campuses and nearly 35,000 students — makes it one of the largest adolescent health datasets a university has gathered on its own.

The official voice is Gustavo Olaiz Fernández, UNAM's Director General of Health Care. He set the benchmark bluntly: alcohol consumption at this age should be "practically nonexistent". He also framed the finding within a national trend rather than a purely internal matter. That framing matters: it is reputational management and an admission that a school cannot solve a problem that lives outside its gates.

On intervention, UNAM chose the soft route: screening "without stigmatising", expanded prevention programming, and bringing families into the process instead of handling individuals.

The gender reversal is the most notable signal

Reading this dataset the way I read youth fitness reports, the point worth pausing on is not the headline rate but its internal structure. The female drinking rate was elevated into a separately named group while male students appeared only in comparative form — meaning the gender reversal, not overall consumption, is what pushed UNAM's health board into alert mode. Across decades of adolescent behavioural data, males usually post higher rates for alcohol and stimulant use. When that order flips in a sample of nearly 35,000, it is a change in pattern rather than random noise.

Sample size is a rare bonus. Nearly 35,000 observations across 14 campuses are enough to separate signal from noise — something most football form analysis lacks, even as people draw conclusions about a team's "tactical identity" from three matches.

Two technical caveats must be stated, because I do not want to repeat a mistake I once made reading transfer data too quickly. Self-reported data tends to be skewed by social pressure: students may conceal behaviour they consider wrong, which means the true rate is more likely higher, not lower. The source also gives no methodological detail — pure self-report or accompanied by clinical checks — so absolute accuracy cannot be fixed.

Football has no leg to stand on in this dataset

The only bridge between this dataset and football lies in the name of the institution: UNAM owns Pumas UNAM, a Liga MX club. The Pumas academy has produced first-team names such as Hugo Sánchez — later a five-time Pichichi winner in La Liga — and goalkeeper Jorge Campos. But the source I am analysing does not mention Pumas' youth system once, does not say whether the EMA applies to student-athletes, and does not say whether prevention programming extends to the university's sporting arm.

Where could I be wrong? If UNAM does screen students enrolled in sports training, then the mental health of 15-to-18-year-olds immediately becomes a player-safeguarding issue, and this story genuinely belongs in football. The next risk sits with me: reading a public-health document through a sporting lens, a cross-border practitioner can easily assign meaning a dataset does not carry. And self-reported data can always be used by a health board in a direction that suits its communications strategy, while I have no independent verification.

One thing I am sure of: if a university owns a professional club, then screening mental health at age 15 is work the sporting arm should do first, not last. Based on my experience following matches and youth academies, academies in Vietnam and China have almost no periodic psychological screening for players aged 15 to 18. They measure jump power, VO2max, 30-metre sprint times. They do not measure anxiety levels. Before 2026 I watched football with my eyes. After 2026, I watch it with numbers that can cry. And the most tear-worthy thing inside an academy has never appeared on a results board.

A forward-looking thought

The conclusion runs in the direction I always want to push — accepting that I am standing in front of a misclassification. UNAM's dataset belongs to public health, and the most honest way for someone who writes about football to use it is to not turn it into something else. The awakening here is realising that data discipline does not only help me say the right thing about a club; it forces me to stay silent when I have no basis to speak.

But there is one question I will leave behind, and bet on it: within 12 months, a European or Mexican club will most likely announce periodic mental-health screening for its youth academy, and the first to do so will be praised as a pioneer — while a university health board in Mexico City did the same thing at a scale of 35,000 people before them. I said it already: what football needs to copy from medical science is not the conclusion, but the habit of collecting data before a crisis arrives.