As professional football becomes more and more lucrative for aspiring youngsters, many with actual talent tend to focus just on it rather than anything else. There is only a small section of footballers who pursue higher education or even pay attention to school when they’re climbing the ranks at a well-known club.
Therefore, many footballers don’t get the right kind of education as they believe there’s no need for it in football. Some players who start gaining the spotlight from a very young age tend to abandon even their school-level education.
A good example of how very little-to-no knowledge some young footballers have when it comes to subjects like mathematics was recently exposed at the expense of Chelsea. Before the start of the Premier League season, the Blues hosted a session on their TikTok channel where some players were asked math-related questions.
Their rising youngsters Conor Gallagher as well as Trevoh Chalobah were the ones posed with some questions. Now, these questions aren’t anything ‘advanced’. They are basic, school-level math queries that anyone with a decent idea of the subject should be able to solve.
In his turn, Gallagher was given a maths equation to solve: ‘6+15×1=?’. There were two answer options, -9 and 21.
In a truly bizarre fashion, Gallagher went with the former option – which was clearly the wrong answer. This left many fans stunned at how the Chelsea academy product didn’t even have a clue about the most basic of math.
But the joke wasn’t finished there. His teammate, Trevoh Chalobah – who had his breakthrough season with Thomas Tuchel’s side last season was also given a few math questions to solve.
In the first one, he was asked – what is 3 squared? He had the answers 6 and 9 in the options, choosing the former as he perhaps thought it meant the double of 3.
Chalobah was then asked to name the square of 36, with the options 5 and 6. He shockingly chose 5, which doesn’t even make any sense. Granted that the Chelsea youngsters had a timer going on for the rapid-math question round, but these are absolutely basic stuff that can be solved by any school kid.
It’s clear that neither footballer paid much attention to maths at all in school nor did they focus on their education. For their own sakes, they’ll hope to enjoy successful football careers which won’t allow them to regret their decision to avoid proper education.
