Does “Mens sana in corpore sano’’ apply to soccer players?

By Daniel Kennefick and Laurent Bellaiche

In recent years, the role of sports in higher education has been a controversial topic in the United States. College sports, in which student athletes compete at a near professional level while trying to pursue a college degree, attract such a large audience that they generate considerable revenues for American universities. The question frequently asked is whetherthe athletes at the center of this enormous business should be compensated. Should college sports be run on a professional or semi-professional basis?

By contrast, collegiate athletics in Europe are simply not that big a deal. No one would dream of attending a match between two University teams unless they were actually attending that college and a personal friend was playing. Even dedicated sports fans attending college in a University town, finding themselves unable to support their usual hometown team, will find a local professional team to support (as when English author Nick Hornby, whose writing is discussed further below, devoted several chapters of his footballing memoir to his support of hapless Cambridge United FC). But furthermore, the expectation is that the most serious students, the real intellectuals, would not wish to be seen dead at a football match. Anyone with the slightest pretension to the life of the mind would prefer not to admit an interest in soccer, the most proletarian of all team sports. Sometimes the intellectuals get quite nasty about it, as with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who supposedly opined that soccer, “is popular because stupidity is popular.” And yet in England, home of soccer, the traditional credo of education was that enunciated by the Roman poet Juvenal: “You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body’’ [orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano]. Why shouldn’t educated people take an interest in sport?

So, where are the intellectual footballers? They are so few that they make famous cases, like Albert Camus, the French Algerian writer who won the Nobel prize for literature and who famously played in goal for the Algerian team Racing Universitaire d’Alger (despite its name a club side rather than an official team of the University of Algiers, where Camus was in the process of obtaining his bachelor of Arts degree)? He played with them for two years before a bout with tuberculosis forced him to stop playing. The existentialist writer later claimed: “After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” Mind you, although Racing were then a top North African team, Camus only played for their junior team, so he certainly never played professionally. The more typical case of a professional soccer player is that of Garrincha, the great Brazilian star of the fifties and sixties, widely considered one of top footballers in history, who came from a desperately poor background, and reportedly never learned to read. For the typical professional soccer player, attending University was an impossible dream.

Let’s look at those who combined athleticism with scholarship. We will consider the ones who were fortunate enough to enjoy true happiness, according to the dictate of the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, who said “What man is happy? Whoever has a healthy body, a sophisticated mind, and teachable nature.” We will seek such happy individuals in the form of footballers who played for professional clubs and also held University degrees.

It is the goal of this article to demonstrate that such advice was, in fact, closely followed by some soccer players who succeeded in combining both education and a successful football career. A particular example is Harald Bohr, who was an esteemed mathematician and who also obtained the silver medal with the Danish soccer team at the 1908 Olympic Games held in London. This midfielder was part of the team who inflicted France’s worst defeat ever  in a soccer game,  an embarrassing 17-1 (with 10 goals from the one player, Sophus Nielsen). His popularity as a soccer player was such that it is said that there were more soccer fans than mathematicians during his Ph.D. defense. This popularity also manifested itself when his brother, Niels Bohr (who was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics), met the King of Denmark. This royal monarch declared, “Ah, this is the famous Bohr,’’ to which Niels answered “I am sorry, but my brother is not here.”

Other soccer players as well as coaches come from highly educated families. An example is the international Englishman Ben Chilwell, who was pivotal in helping Chelsea win the 2021 UEFA Champions’ League, and whose maternal grandfather, Guy Shuttleworth, attended King’s College in Cambridge where played first-class cricket. Shuttleworth then became a schoolmaster and head of the mathematics department at St. Peter’s School, York, which is arguably the third-oldest school in the world. Moreover, the player who scored the  winning goal for Germany at the 2014 World Cup Final against Argentina, Mario Götze, is the son of Jürgen Götze, a professor for Information Processing at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Technical University of Dortmund. Similarly, the father of the Portuguese coach, André Villas-Boas, is a professor in the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering at the University of Porto. The latter has a rather simple name that is so easy to remember: Luís Filipe Manuel Henrique do Vale Peixoto de Sousa e Villas-Boas. André Villas-Boas is also the great-grandson of the first Viscount of Guilhomi, Dom José Gerardo Coelho Vieira Pinto do Vale Peixoto de Vilas-Boas, and is the youngest manager to win a European competition. This happened at the tender age of 33 years and 213 days, with the 2011 UEFA Europa League while he was coaching Porto.

There are also players who received high-level academic degrees while playing soccer at the top level. For instance, the Frenchman Philippe Redon had a diploma in pharmacy from the University of Rennes. He scored the first goal ever of the professional club of Rennes in a European competition. This happens against the Scottish Glasgow Rangers on September 15, 1971 in the European Winner’s Cup, in Redon’s first game with Rennes. Redon is considered among the top 25 players from the French region of Brittany, but never practiced pharmacy to the best of our knowledge. He rather became a coach of clubs as well as   African countries (Cameroon and Liberia) after his soccer career was over.  On the other hand, Mexico’s Hugo Sánchez has a degree in dentistry from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) that he has  used from time to time. Sánchez is typically regarded as the best Mexican player ever and had a tally of 29 games in 58 games for the Mexican national team. He was elected the best sportiest of Mexico in the 20th century. He is also fondly remembered by the fans of two Madrid teams, Atletico and Real. With the former, he won one Copa del Rey, and put the ball at the back of the net 82 times in 152 matches. With the latter, he had a flurry of trophies (five Ligas, one Copa del Rey, one UEFA Cup) and goals (208 in 280 games). He finished five times as top scorer of the Spanish Liga and once of the Mexican league. Another soccer superstar held a degree in the medical field. It is the Brazilian Sócrates, who got a bachelor’s degree from the medical school at the University of São Paulo while playing professional soccer at the same time allowing him to be a physician. His degree, in addition to his elegant and clever style of playing, inspired his nickname of Doctor Sócrates. He was the captain of one of the most beautiful teams to watch in soccer history, the Brazil of 1982, and was elected as the 1983 South American Player of the Year. He was a big advocate of democracy and practiced medicine after his retirement as a soccer player. However, like Garrincha, Sócrates was a heavy drinker, which ultimately led to his death at the age of 57 in December 2011. Words said at that time indicate the passion he inspired in some: “Brazil had lost one of its most cherished sons. On the field, with his talent and sophisticated touches, he was a genius. Off the field… he was active politically, concerned with his people and his country’’. This brilliant midfielder has also a brother, named Raí, who not only wore the armband of the Brazilian national team and was also named the South American Player of the Year about 10 years later than his sibling but is also eager to learn outside the world of football. This explains why Raí decided to take courses on French literature at the Sorbonne University while he was playing for Paris Saint-Germain (PSG). At this prestigious institution created in 1257, he discovered Molière’s work in the French language, which made his dad, an avid reader, very proud. For its 50-year anniversary, a jury formed by supporters, journalists and former players named Raí as the best player in PSG’s history. This Brazilian marvel also received an honorary degree from Paris-Nanterre University in 2019.

Many people know that Sócrates played with the famous Corinthians club of Sao Paulo. This club in turn took its name from a once famous English club, Corinthian F.C., founded in 1882, who toured Brazil in 1910. While the Brazilian team they inspired was founded by manual workers, the original Corinthian was an amateur club whose membership was drawn from the middle and upper classes. As such, it was common for players to have college degrees. The club was set up to promote amateurism at a time when professionalism was on the rise in soccer , and also to strengthen English football, which was then decidedly second best to Scotland on the nascent international scene . Corinthian aimed to play in the Scottish style, which favored passing and off-the-ball movement over the dribbling, kick and rush style predominant in England. They had considerable success, once providing the entire English team for an international match. Their aim can be said to have been the promotion of intelligence both on and off the field.

Their insistence on amateurism has left one lasting mark on English football, in the form of the FA Community Shield (known for most of its history as the Charity Shield). Today this fixture forms the traditional start to the English football season, played for between the previous year’s league champions and the winners of the FA Cup. It was inspired by an early 20th century competition called the Sherrif of London Charity Shield which was a gentlemen versus players match held yearly between an amateur and a professional team. In every year but one Corinthian were the amateur participants, playing teams like Liverpool, Newcastle and Sunderland, Villa and Spurs (and both Sheffield teams). The only year they did not feature was 1899, when Glasgow’s Queen’s Park came south from Scotland to play Aston Villa, sharing the trophy after a 0-0 draw. Queen’s Park, indeed, were almost certainly the inspiration for the foundation of Corinthian. They were an amateur team strongly associated with the great period of Scottish football excellence in the 19th century. As with Corinthian and England, Scotland once took the field with a team of eleven players from Queen’s Park. Queen’s Park continued to compete in the Scottish League as an amateur club until very recently (they have now gone professional). One top current player in the English league, Liverpool’s left back Andy Robertson, began his career playing amateur football for Queen’s Park.

Corinthian however, refused to participate in competitive matches at all, except for the Charity Shield. They played only friendly matches, which of course had been the norm before the development of competitions like the FA Cup and the Football League. Although Corinthian refused to participate in the FA Cup (until the 1920s), Queen’s Park did do so, appearing in the final twice, the only non-English club apart from Cardiff City to do so. After Cardiff City won the competition in 1927, their opponents in the Charity Shield were Corinthian (Cardiff won 2-1).

Examples of top Queen’s Park players who had degrees and successful careers in the professions were David Wilson (scorer of 38 goals in 159 appearances for the club between 1897 and 1905), who practiced as a solicitor and Harry Paul (41 goals in 209 appearances from 1905 to 1914) who was a veterinary surgeon who studied at Glasgow University. His career ended in 1914 because he departed for the great War and became an officer in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps. Both men played internationally for Scotland. Undoubtedly the most famous player to appear for Corinthian was C. B. Fry, one of the outstanding English athletes of his era. He was a star pupil at Oxford in the 1890s, earning a first-class honors in honors moderations (“mods”), important exams taken about midway through a student’s career while studying Classics (Latin and/or Greek) and having a similar role to the Mathematical Tripos for mathematics and physics students at Cambridge. However, he then suffered a temporary mental breakdown and graduated with a fourth-class honors degree. He had been a star athlete in multiple sports at Oxford but was unable to earn a living by his sporting activities because of his distaste for professionalism, and professionals. The gentlemen versus players distinction which was rife in English sport at the time contained a good deal of class snobbery.

With the help of a friend of his wife’s, and by writing sports journalism, he found he could make a living while mostly concentrating on his sporting activities. He is best remembered as a cricketer who captained England, but was also as a successful soccer player, appearing for Corinthian for many years. However, he had ambitions to play for England in soccer as well as cricket and in the early 20th century fewer and fewer amateurs were appearing for England. In the end he decided to join a professional club, Southampton, though he was not paid to play for them. He did ultimately play for England and also appeared in the FA Cup final of 1902. Southampton were then still a non-league club and lost the Final, after a replay, to Sheffield United. Although liberal in his politics as a younger man (he even ran for parliament, unsuccessfully) he flirted with fascism in the thirties. This was not an uncommon thing amongst middle class people who resented the increasing turn towards democracy as more and more people (even women!) earned the right to vote. It provides a contrast to Sócrates of the Brazilian Corinthians, who famously championed left-wing causes and stood up for democracy against the fascist regime in Brazil.

Nevertheless, in other respects Fry epitomized the “Corinthian spirit,” being a talented (in his youth, brilliant) scholar as well as an all-rounder in athletics and various intellectual pursuits. He was someone who could turn his hand to anything. In addition to soccer and cricket he was a top-class track and field athlete (holding a world record in the long jump) and could perform well in a range of other sports like ice skating, gymnastics and rugby. His party trick was to stand in front of a fireplace at country houses and jump so as to land standing on the mantlepiece.

In England, at least, the old class distinction regarding sports persisted until recent times. Indeed, the very term soccer is a reflection of this, since working-class English people always refer to the sport as football, while soccer is an example of 19th century English public-school slang (in England a public school is a particularly expensive kind of private school; they are called “public” because they date back to a time when wealthy people usually educated their children at home with privately-hired governors). Upper class people from such schools (like Fry, who went to Repton) call Rugby rugger and asSOCiation football soccer. To this day upper class Brits sometimes call the sport soccer and themselves prefer to play rugby football. As recently as the Tory premiership of David Cameron, Cameron was widely suspected of pretending to support Aston Villa (on the grounds that his uncle was once chairman of the club) in order to seem like a football-supporting man of the people. He would sometimes appear to forget which club he “supported” (though he seemed to remember that his supposed fancied team wore claret and blue, as when he referenced West Ham on one embarrassing occasion).

Keeping in mind this class distinction in English society, we can consider our next footballer with a degree, Liverpool’s Steve Heighway. Probably because he had a middle-class upbringing and attended a grammar school he was not scouted by professional clubs. Heighway played for non-league Skelmersdale United while studying for his degree in politics and economics at Warwick University. It was while studying for his final exams that he was scouted by Liverpool and signed to join the team under famous manager and former coal miner Bill Shankly. His academic credentials were certainly considered unusual by his teammates, who nicknamed him “Big Bamber” after television presenter and public intellectual Bamber Gascoigne, who hosted the popular BBC quiz show University Challenge, in which teams from colleges compete in an unusually academic-level quiz. His nickname reflected the fact that Liverpool had two players with college degrees at the time, his teammate Brian Hall being “Little Bamber.” Despite his late start in the professional game, Heighway went on to be one of Liverpool’s all-time greats, featuring as a goal scoring winger in their greatest era. His legacy is such that he is the only other player besides Kenny Dalglish mentioned in the terrace anthem “Fields of Anfield Road.” In his career he won five league titles, an FA Cup, a League Cup, two UEFA Cups and two European Cups (along with three Charity Shields, another one shared, and one European Super Cup), a fantastic haul. He also played internationally for Ireland, where he was born, though his family background and most of his upbringing was English.  

In order to show that not all intellectuals are middle class, we will consider the case of Scotland’s Pat Nevin, who played for Chelsea and Everton in his professional career. Nevin features prominently in the famous memoir of life as a football supporter by Nick Hornby (best known in the America for the book which inspired the movie High Fidelity, starring John Cusack; his football memoir is called Fever Pitch and was made into two movies, one in Britain starring Colin Firth, and one in America starring Drew Barrymore). In his book Hornby comments on the difficulty, as a middle class intellectual, of admitting to his friends and colleagues that he followed professional football. He cites Nevin as an example of someone whose views on music and art made him feel like it was ok to combine soccer and the life of the mind. Nevin himself has spoken of how his interest in new wave music (Nevin was a professional player during the 1980s) set him conspicuously apart from his teammates. He also tells a story of lying to his girlfriend about needing to study when he would in fact be away playing football, because he didn’t want her to know he played soccer. When he ended up featuring in the newspapers, he had to come clean.

However, Nevin’s background was very much working class, though his family was an intellectual one. Brought up in a tenement in the rough Glasgow neighborhood of Easterhouse, in a family of Irish extraction. He was a childhood supporter of Celtic F.C. (one of the two main clubs in Glasgow) and joined their youth system as a teenager. This is the typical route to success for British footballers, and completely ignores not only University but the later stages of secondary school. However, Celtic took the view that Nevin, though a brilliant schoolboy player, was too small and slight for a professional career. Calmly Nevin decided to go to University, studying Commerce at Glasgow College of Technology (now part of Glasgow Caledonian University). While doing so he played part time with Clyde (so as not to interrupt his studies), then in the lowest division of the Scottish league. He had a very successful period with them, which included promotion, and this brought him to the attention of London’s Chelsea. After turning them down once he ended up abandoning his degree to become a full-time professional in west London.

Chelsea in 1983, when Nevin arrived, were a glamorous club who had fallen on hard times. Traditionally bracketed with Spurs as a classy cup team who could usually be relied upon to blow it in the league, they had encountered a period of financial instability, and not long before he joined the club it was sold for one pound sterling, a far cry from the two and a half billion pounds they were recently purchased for. In 1982-83 they narrowly escaped relegation to the third division, but Nevin immediately had an impact, assisting them to a major revival which saw them promoted back to the first division in 1983-84. After several successful seasons with Chelsea, they endured another relegation in 1988. He attracted the attention of the traditional giants of the English game, Everton F.C. His other option was the then emerging Paris Saint Germain. To the surprise of his future wife, he chose Liverpool over the allure of Paris, preferring football to culture. Unfortunately, he arrived just after the conclusion of Everton’s last great period and failed to win any silverware with either of his English clubs, but his typically Scottish style of mercurial wing play is fondly remembered by fans of both clubs. His international career with Scotland also did not coincide with their best era, though he did win the European youth (U-18) championship, as the player of the tournament. It was this tournament that he tried to unsuccessfully to hide his participation in from his girlfriend! Apparently, he did later finish an Arts degree at Glasgow Caledonian University, and has also received at least one honorary degree.

It is also worth noting that the Spaniard Juan Mata earned a degree in Journalism from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. He also completed distance courses and obtained two degrees from the Universidad Camilo Jose Cela in Madrid, one in marketing and another in sports science, while he was playing for Valencia and Chelsea. This smart midfielder won a Copa Del Rey with Valencia and 2 FA Cups, two UEFA Europa Leagues and one UEFA Champions League with the English teams of Chelsea and Manchester United. He was also part of the Spanish national team that was crowned world and European champion in 2010 and 2012, respectively. His IQ has been measured to be about 140, which is quite remarkable when realizing that this places him in the top 0.4% of the population and that Albert Einstein’s IQ was estimated to be around 160. Even more impressive is that a teammate of Mata in La Roja, Gerard Piqué, has an IQ of 170. This clever center-back spent the summer of 2017 to participate in a master’s degree at Harvard on business of entertainment, media and sport, while he was still playing for Barca. It is thus no wonder that Piqué has hands on media and business ventures, including being the founder and president of an investment group that is involved in the transformation of the Davis Cup’s competition in tennis. However, one may ask if someone who separated from the Colombian singer-songwriter Shakira is really that smart…

Speaking of gifted women, one wonders if there are some who also combined earning academic degrees with successful soccer careers. For instance, Clara Matéo, who recently took part in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup with the French national team, obtained an Engineering degree with a specialty in Materials in 2020. She got that diploma from Polytech Paris Saclay that belongs to a University ranked in the top 30 in the world for Engineering, Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy. Another impressive case is that of Nadia Nadim. She was born in Afghanistan in 1988 but had to be smuggled out of her native country with her mother and four sisters, to arrive in Denmark after her dad, a general in the Afghan army, was executed by the Taliban in 2000. In this Scandinavian country, she initially stayed in a refugee camp and watched from behind its fence some Danish girls playing soccer. Nadim immediately fell in love with the beautiful game, and then started to play soccer with different teams, including B52 Aalborg, team Viborg and IK Skovbakken. Nadim was granted Danish citizenship in 2008, which then allowed her to play for the national team of her new country in 2009. This forward has now played more than 100 games for the Danish team, with a tally of 38 goals. Nadim speaks nine languages–Danish, English, German, Persian, Dari, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic and French– which no doubt helped her integrate well into the U.S. teams of Sky Blue FC, Portland Thorns FC and Racing Louisville, the English club of Manchester City and the French Paris Saint-Germain during her ongoing career. There, she won the U.S. and French top divisions. Nadim also started to study medicine around 2012, balancing the twin tasks of playing soccer at the top level and attending medical school. Apparently, it takes a woman to take on this level of challenge. Pat Nevin, one of our most impressive men (like Nadim, not benefiting from a fortunate start to life), said that he could manage to play part time with lower division Clyde while pursuing a degree, since “it was easy because Clyde only trained twice a week in the evenings and I was a student – I wasn’t doing medicine so it was very doable.” In January 2022, she graduated from Aarhus University with a specialty in reconstructive surgery and now qualifies as a surgeon. She was named UNESCO Champion for girls and women’s education in July 2019. Her achievement and intellect put her in a rarified air amongst scholar-athletes. C. B. Fry was so admired as a man of all the talents by his contemporaries that he was sometimes lionized as the “greatest ever Englishman.” We heartily endorse the notion that combining the life of the mind with great athleticism is meritorious, but we ask our readers to consider that the title holder may not be the “greatest ever” man, but the greatest ever woman. One is reminded of the popular, and possibly apocryphal, anecdote that Marie Curie, who shared her first Nobel prize with her husband Pierre, was once asked what it was like to be married to a genius and retorted “ask my husband.”

Finally, we close with an example close to home. We have seen that in European countries athlete-scholars are few in number, since these countries do not typically incorporate education and sport within the same structure. There are plenty of great examples here in the United States, since so many prominent players have attended college to pursue further education while holding a sporting scholarship to play for their University team. To pick just one local example, there is Parker Goins, a star forward for the Razorbacks for a number of years who has a degree from the U of A in Kinesiology and a Masters in Operations Management, also from the U of A. She is currently playing professionally with Racing Louisville in the NWSL. 

Daniel Kennefick is a physicist at the U of A studying gravitational waves and galactic structure. He is the author of three books on the history of science “Traveling at the Speed of Thought,” “An Einstein Encyclopedia”  and “No Shadow of a Doubt,” all from Princeton University Press. Growing up in a sporting family in Ireland he has been a passionate supporter of various forms of football, and other sports, from a young age. He has several family members who were well known players of hurling, gaelic football and rugby. In soccer terms he began supporting Liverpool at a young age, attracted by their winger, Steve Heighway, who played internationally for Ireland. His family emigrated to Canada when he was in grade school, and he can remember going to see the great Pele play for the New York Cosmos against local team Toronto Metro-Croatia. He returned to Ireland after a few years and his chief sporting passion as a teenager and since is Track and Field, both as participant and spectator. He scored brownie points when meeting his future wife and being told she attended the University of Arkansas and he was able to say not “where is Arkansas?” but “oh, that’s where all the (Irish) runners go!”

Laurent Bellaiche is a Distinguished Professor in the Physics Department and Institute for Nanoscience and Engineering, as well as the Twenty-First Century Endowed Professor in Optics, Nanoscience and Science Education (for more details, please see: ccmp.uark.edu). His favorite team is Paris Saint-Germain, especially that of the first trophies (French Cups) in the 1980’s, with the three Dominique’s (Baratelli, Bathenay and Rocheteau) and two jewels (Safet Susic and Mustapha Dahleb). His two favorite male football players of all time are Diego Armando Maradona and Robby Rensenbrink. His current three favorite female players are Grace Geyoro, Melchie Dumornay and, of course,  Sophia Smith. His favorite soccer/football quote is one from Bill Shankly, “Some people think football is a matter of life and death – I assure you, it’s much more important than that.”