Interview with Sean: a day in the Cesc Fàbregas Academy

How was a regular day in the Cesc Fàbregas Academy for you?

8:30h: We got up at 8:30h but I usually got up at 8:00h so I could go and eat my breakfast before the children woke up, it was my minute of peace (laughs). Then I was bombarded by 300 children!

I sat with the children and I talk to them, there were kids from Canada, Kazakhstan, Germany, etc. and a lot of them couldn’t speak Spanish, so I chatted with them to make them feel more comfortable, many of them felt very homesick.

10:00h: After breakfast we played a bit of football or did training exercises. I was there to help with all those tasks too, depending on the day I was with the group of the small kids or the big ones, playing football or basketball. The big ones, who were between 12 and 17 years old, were a lot of fun and many of them had a good level of English.



About 14:00h we had lunch and after it we always did a football tournament in the Tordera football pitches –really good pitches-. Of course I took a back seat when it came to football training because I’m not a football trainer at all, but after a few days I realized I could perfectly help with the training as well, you know, when you’ve been playing football every day for 11 years, between 5 and 16 years old, you know how to play it! You can tell 12 years old how to kick it properly! haha

18:00h: After the tournament we relaxed for a little while and we went to the swimming pool for about one hour and a half.

At 20:00h we set everything for dinner, and after dinner we relaxed and then had a gymkhana with different exercises each day.

How were the English classes with kids?

There weren’t proper classes because kids wanted mainly conversation but some of the advanced students, from Russia and Bulgaria, asked for a class to learn football vocabulary. So I did it… a class with 70 children… nothing to do with What’s Up! classes of 6 – 10 people, I was sweating a little bit… but kids loved it and it was quite fun.

Teaching kids was actually very nice. They were very good kids because they have the goal of being like Cesc Fàbregas and they were said how they have to behave to achieve this, so instead of having a lot of kids running around we had very good kids, very disciplined, very willing to learn and very respectful.

How was meeting Cesc Fàbregas?

I took a back seat again because from my point of view Cesc was there for the kids, not for anyone else. It was nice to meet him but what I enjoyed more was seeing the children meeting him, because they were clearly very inspired and excited about it, and there’s where I got my pleasure from, to be honest. Kids were asking questions to him and Cesc spent a few hours to have a picture taken with each of the students. Meeting Cesc Fàbregas was a great experience because it made a lot of young kids happy and it was really nice to see.

What were the highlights of the Cesc Fàbregas Academy?

Firstly, making a positive influence on the kids and seeing them enjoying it so much. That was the real highlight for me. Then at the end they threw me up in the air and did a big wave for me saying “¡Sean no te vayas!”, telling me they want me to be their English teacher in their school. I felt almost like crying and I appreciated it so much. It was very, very, very, very nice. Ah! And playing football with the children was great as well!