Football has taken me to different countries and placed me in very different environments throughout my career. First as an athlete and then working in other areas of the sport.
When you move to a different country, you quickly realize that while football may have the same rules on the pitch, almost everything around it changes.
The way people communicate, how clubs are organized, how athletes are received, how professionals build relationships, and even the meaning of an opportunity can all be different.
Living through these experiences also changed the way I came to view a career in sports.
Experiencing different realities in football has taught me that an opportunity never exists in isolation. The environment in which it arises is also part of the career.
Leaving your comfort zone changes the way you see football.
An international experience demands much more than just adapting to the sporting environment.
There's a new language, a different culture, people you don't yet know, and a routine that needs to be rebuilt. At the same time, it's precisely this process that allows you to observe other ways of working and relating to the sport.
Throughout these experiences, some things have started to make even more sense to me:
- Adaptation: Understand the environment before trying to replicate what worked elsewhere.
- Communication: Knowing how to express oneself and understand different contexts opens doors both on and off the field.
- Relationships: Many opportunities arise from the connections built along the way.
- Preparation: Arriving in another country is just the beginning; being prepared for that experience is another matter entirely.
- Perspective: Learning about other realities helps to see possibilities that weren't even part of the plans before.
I also learned that international experience shouldn't be measured solely by the number of countries listed on a resume.
What matters most is what each experience adds to the experience.
Some teach about football. Others, about people. Some show structures that work well. Others make it very clear what still needs to change.
And they all end up influencing the decisions that come later.
Today, when I work with athletes and organizations, part of how I analyze a career or a project comes precisely from this repertoire.
Not because there is an international model that can simply be taken from one country to another, but because knowing different contexts helps to ask better questions about each reality.
Football has taken me to different places. And each one of them has changed, a little bit, the way I understand football itself.
