Bad news for volleyball.

It’s really sad that a national team with players in the best leagues of the World and actual European Champion has been eliminated of the World Championship, after being classified for it, due to a scarce number of spectators in the international matches that have been played in its country. I’m talking about the masculine national Spanish volleyball team, this situation is unfair especially for the players and all the people around this team, Spain has not ever been in the top ten of national volleyball teams, and after decades of fighting, we are there, when we are in the top of the wave, in the elite group of this sport but something has eclipsed all this effort.

What happens in this country, and in the majority of the others, is that money only goes for football, and these amounts of money are mainly invested in media for publicity. What do people do? People do what they find in the press, and nowadays, the main thing we find is FOOTBALL, and if we are lucky, in our country, a bit of basketball or tennis.

Our city, Soria is an exception in Spain because with its size, it has an elite volleyball and football team, and what happens? It happens that the situation of the football one isn’t in danger because it generates a lot of money, but the volleyball one is always with problems in its direction and economic activities.

Why in our city we have much more than twenty football school teams and in volleyball we have ten at much? Because the result is what children watch at TV or at the press, they see that loads of people are rich due to that sport. In the case of volleyball, in our province we have something to see to in our volleyball elite team, but not to much to find in the press.

My team has two categories, we play a league in our region, Castilla y Leon, and when we end the highest category (at the age of 15-16) we have nowhere to play except from a team of a senior category that requires a lot of money for the transport and inscription of it. While in volleyball, when we are 16 we have problems of finding somewhere to play, in football they have dozens of teams with a great variety of levels of game and categories to choose.

What we can do to solve this problem? It’s difficult but not impossible to solve it, because the solution, like lots of times in this unfair world is money. But this problem has to become solved starting with the promotion of different sports in young people and with the accessibility to them in the fields of media.