UNAM Screened 35,000 Students: The Welfare Gap the V-League Transfer Market Never Prices In

UNAM has just published the results of a health screening covering roughly 35,000 newly enrolled high-school students across 14 campuses. The tool they used is the Examen Médico Automatizado (EMA) — an automated medical examination designed to read both the physical and the mental condition of incoming students. About 3 in 10 female students reported drinking alcohol; nearly half of those surveyed reported using at least one substance at some point.

Gustavo Olaiz Fernández, UNAM’s Director General of Health Care, called that rate a level that “should be practically nonexistent” for this age group. UNAM is the parent institution of Pumas UNAM, a Liga MX club. The screening population, however, is the university’s preparatory high-school system, not the professional team.

For someone who reads transfer valuations for a living, that news item has a very specific resonance. It measures precisely the data field that every youth-player valuation model in the world leaves blank.

In Vietnamese football, the idea of screening students for health is less alien than people assume. The big academies all employ doctors, run periodic check-ups, and measure height, weight, VO2 max and bone age before taking on an 11-year-old. HAGL JMG Academy opened in 2026 and produced the generation of Công Phượng, Tuấn Anh, Xuân Trường, Văn Toàn, Văn Thanh and Minh Vương. PVF was founded in 2026 under Vingroup and later moved to Văn Giang, Hưng Yên. Viettel, Sông Lam Nghệ An and Hà Nội built their own systems too. On the physical side, that infrastructure is sufficient.

On every other side, it is not.

The Vietnamese transfer market runs on a very narrow set of metrics: minutes, goals, assists, age, national-team caps, and more recently a handful of advanced numbers supplied by overseas data platforms. There is no field for sleep, anxiety, family relationships, or substance use.

That is why Vietnamese players’ moves abroad tend to be misread from the forecast stage onward. Nguyễn Quang Hải joined Pau FC in Ligue 2 in 2026. Đoàn Văn Hậu joined SC Heerenveen on loan in 2026. Lương Xuân Trường joined Gangwon FC in 2026. Nguyễn Công Phượng joined Mito Hollyhock in J2 in 2026. Every deal was analysed on technical metrics, and most ended earlier than projected. People call that an adaptation problem. I do not dispute the label. But adaptation is another name for mental health.

I have sat in the Lạch Tray stands often enough to know what an 18-year-old looks like when he is pushed into a match with his family sitting right below the touchline. And I once used a regression model to predict that Hải Phòng would sell Errol Stevens to CLB TP.HCM for a fee of around USD 400,000, after analysing 15 matches showing his scoring rate had fallen to 0.28 goals per game. Two weeks later, the deal was done. Scoring data can be read. Human data cannot.

EMA runs across 14 campuses, collecting both physical and mental data on incoming students, and UNAM uses the results to design intervention programmes. They do not use it to rank students. The entire difference lies in purpose: screening in order to support.

Youth football runs the other way. Every test at an academy serves a single function — deciding who stays and who is cut. Bone age decides whether you are taken. The fitness test decides whether you reach the first team. When the measuring tool carries a selection function, a 15-year-old learns very quickly that telling the truth is shooting himself in the foot.

This is a structural blind spot: the same set of metrics, placed in the hands of an educational institution, produces real data; placed in the hands of an academy, it produces data that has been polished. Nobody has to teach a young player to lie to a doctor. The system teaches him.

Training a player from 11 to 18 costs an academy anywhere from hundreds of millions to several billion đồng: accommodation, schooling, coaching salaries, pitches, medical care. Within that medical budget, most of the money flows into injuries — muscle, joint, ligament, the things that show up on a scan. The share devoted to mental health is close to zero. A few academies have a part-time psychologist. Most have nobody.

The selling side creates no better signal. FIFA’s training compensation mechanism and solidarity contribution (5% shared among clubs that trained a player between the ages of 12 and 23) generate cash flow for academies. But that money rewards producing a player who signs a professional contract; it does not reward keeping a player mentally healthy.

An academy gets paid when its players leave, and does not get paid when its players stay with an intact head.

Seventeen and eighteen is the decisive window. A player signs his first professional contract, or goes abroad, or is pushed back into the youth team for another season. It is also the age at which adolescent mental-health data in many countries shows anxiety and depression rising sharply. UNAM recorded that anxiety, depression and substance use among adolescents are trending upward, and classified the trend as a broad social issue rather than a single institution’s problem.

An 18-year-old in the V-League sits exactly at the intersection of those two lines. But his transfer file contains a single line of text: potential.

Youth valuation models assign a very high coefficient to potential and a coefficient close to zero to dressing-room chemistry — while what happens on the pitch shows the two cannot be separated. A 19-year-old midfielder who cannot play because of a family crisis carries a lower transfer value than a 19-year-old midfielder who cannot play because of a hamstring injury, even when the number of days out is identical.

Vietnamese esports is the extreme version of the same error. A professional player’s career is shorter than a footballer’s, the youth development system is thinner, and post-retirement support is close to nonexistent. If football at least has doctors and a gym, many esports rosters have one coach and an eighteen-month contract.

Insider information is not a privilege; it is the reward for those who know how to listen off-frequency — and that frequency is only audible if you sit down with people before you need them. The best agents are not the ones who talk the most, but the ones who know when to stay silent. What I hear from the outer ring of the academies is the same script repeating in both football and esports: people only discover a player’s mental-health problem after he has already collapsed, and by then there is nothing left to value.

The popular reading of the UNAM item is that “Mexican youth are deteriorating.” That reading skips the single most important detail: UNAM screened voluntarily, published voluntarily, and called this a shared problem. They chose to stand inside the picture rather than outside it.

Football academies choose the opposite. They do not measure, so they have nothing to publish.

The finding that female students drink more than male students is data that runs against habit. In Vietnamese youth football there is also data running against habit that nobody will measure: young players are growing up with social media, where every match is publicly rated and every misplaced pass can become a clip. We measure their shooting with xG. They measure themselves with engagement. The two yardsticks diverge, and the second one appears in no technical report.

The problem is that V-League academies have no mechanism whatsoever for knowing what they are missing. A hamstring injury shows up in the weekly medical report. A mental-health crisis shows up in the blank space.

If I have to pick a marker to watch, I pick the next transfer window, and I pick a narrower question: which V-League academy will be the first to put a welfare indicator into a youth player’s file — not as a communications campaign, but as a data field with someone accountable for it? When an 18-year-old collapses for reasons that are not injury, which column will it be recorded in, and who reads that column before signing a contract? If the answer is still “nobody,” is that the player’s problem or the price list’s?

“The market does not lie — only the way you read the numbers is wrong.” The V-League transfer price list is not yet wrong. It has simply never been asked the right question.

Moscow 2026 taught me that football has a language of its own, one that appears in no dictionary. UNAM has just reminded me that other languages work the same way — and that we only hear them if we are willing to go and measure.