The Mislabel: From a Misfiled News Item to Footballers Called by the Wrong Position

On September 10, a short news item appeared on a feature page of The Express Tribune. It concerned Andy Cohen, an American television host, who posted on Instagram the story of being mistaken by a stranger for his own daughter's grandfather. Beneath the post, a few cast members of a reality show left humorous comments. The item ran about two hundred words. No team. No scoreline. Not a single name belonging to a pitch.

And yet it was filed under football. An automated system read the headline, caught a few familiar characters, and applied a label. A small thing, a funny thing. But I sat a long while in front of that label, because in 34 years of reporting on football I have seen that misplaced labels rarely only make people laugh. They price human beings.

Every player who enters a data system is assigned a position card. Centre-back. Full-back. Playmaker. Centre-forward. That card follows him through his whole career: it decides the wage a club is willing to pay, the minutes he gets, the position he is trained in, and even how the crowd remembers him ten years after he hangs up his boots. The transfer market does not sell footballers; it sells dreams that have already been framed. And the frame is nailed together by a line of text that most of the time nobody bothers to check.

When the right flank becomes a narrow doorway

In the summer of 2026, Bayern Munich bought Arjen Robben from Real Madrid. In the file, he was a "right winger". But Robben is left-footed. Over ten seasons at Bayern he scored 144 goals in 309 matches, and most of those goals were born from the same movement: receiving on the right touchline, turning, and curling the ball to the far corner with his left foot.

The label "right winger" described where he stood. It did not describe what he did. And when a whole generation of coaches looked at Robben, they began to teach football according to the label rather than according to the person. Left-footed wingers were pushed to the right. Right-footed wingers were pushed to the left. The only goal: to manufacture a second Robben. The result is thousands of fourteen-year-olds taught that the most valuable skill a winger can own is the skill of cutting inside.

I once saw the consequence at the Guangzhou R&F youth academy. An Under-15 coach told me, in a perfectly calm voice: "We don't teach crossing here any more. Nobody buys crossing players." He was right in the market's way of thinking. And he was wrong in football's way of thinking. When one type of player becomes the standard, the other types do not disappear. They are simply filed in the wrong drawer.

Two names surface at once. Jesús Navas, once the purest right winger in Spanish football, was moved permanently to right-back at Manchester City, where he played under both Manuel Pellegrini and Pep Guardiola. Antonio Valencia, the Ecuadorian winger once voted Manchester United's player of the season by his own team-mates, was pushed to right-back and stayed there for several seasons. Both played well. Both became dependable right-backs. But there is a question nobody asked in the press room: if the system had not labelled the traditional winger obsolete, what might those two have been?

A label can also open a door

If that were the whole story, I would not have written this piece. In football, a misplaced label is not always a sentence.

In 2026-15, Pep Guardiola pulled Philipp Lahm — Bayern's captain, at that moment the best right-back in the world — into central midfield. A whole season, not one game for fun. Lahm lost his familiar position, lost the very style of play that had made his name, and was forced to relearn football from a different angle: seeing the whole pitch instead of only the touchline corridor. When he returned to right-back, he was a different player. The wrong label had opened a room he had never stepped into.

In my phone there is still a handwritten note dated June 30, 2026, the day Trent Alexander-Arnold's contract with Liverpool expired and he moved to Real Madrid on a free transfer. Throughout his years at Anfield, Alexander-Arnold was filed under "right-back" and judged by the defensive standards of a right-back. What he actually did was orchestrate the ball from the back line, delivering passes that playmakers dream of but cannot reach. The error lay in using the label of a position to measure a function that does not belong to that position.

At the same time, another label is being quietly erased from the pitch: the trequartista, the classical number 10. In Europe, the players who wore that label have been renamed number 8s, mezzalas, shuttle midfielders. They are still there, still playing. Only the word used to call them has vanished, and when the word vanishes, the responsibility attached to it vanishes too. No one is entrusted any longer with keeping the rhythm of a match in the space between the lines.

A scar is not ugly; it is a map of matches already played

In 2026, at the Guangzhou R&F youth academy, I met Liu Ruofan, sixteen years old, who had just scored seven goals in the national Under-19 championship. He pulled up his shorts, pointed to the long scar on his knee and said: "The doctor told me I'll never run as fast as I used to." Then he cried in the dressing room.

The newsroom had already prepared a label for me: prodigy. I threw it away. That label was convenient for the article, convenient for the readership, convenient for everyone except the boy who was crying. What I carried away from that day is a conviction that has held me ever since: when a system labels a human being, it is always wrong. Not because the system is poor. But because a label is short, and a person is long.

A year later, in 2026, I was the one applying the wrong label. In the semi-final between Croatia and England at Luzhniki, I called Ivan Rakitić "Rakiti" three times on live television. Social media mocked me for a week. I spent two weeks rewatching all seven of Croatia's matches and writing down the pronunciation of the names of all thirty-two teams at the tournament. I got his name wrong, but I could not get his heart wrong. A name, too, is a label — the first label, the most sacred label a person is ever given.

In 2026, in the middle of the pandemic, I got permission to enter Guangzhou Evergrande's Tianhe Stadium when not a single person was there. I counted 58,000 dust-covered seats, recorded the sound of a ball bouncing on grass and wind running through the corridors. The series "The Breathing of an Empty Stadium" was shared more than 10,000 times. That stadium wore no label of stand or turf. It was simply an empty space that had learned to speak. I do not commentate matches; I retell what the ball whispers.

In 2026, after the Club World Cup was reformed, an Argentine agent asked me to accompany Facundo Beltrán, an eighteen-year-old forward, through a transfer to the Premier League worth 20 million euros. Through that summer window I watched the boy lose sleep over fake news, nearly tear up the contract, panic in a hotel room. What frightened him was not the figure. It was the label that came with it — the twenty-million-euro signing, the tag he would have to carry on his back every Saturday afternoon. I told him how, in 2026, an entire country had laughed at me for mispronouncing Rakitić's name. He calmed down and signed on the final afternoon.

What I want to ask before I put down the pen

That news item of September 10, if it were removed from the football section, nobody would remember. But it is a small mirror placed exactly where I tend to look. Any system that sorts human beings — a news classification algorithm, a transfer database, a press room, a sports desk — will produce misplaced labels. The problem lies in whether anyone is patient enough to peel the label off and look at the person underneath.

The pitch is a page, every run an unfinished line of verse. The labeller writes only one word on it. The reader of the label has the right to read on.

If tomorrow some system slaps a card on you — a position, a price, an age limit, a job title — my question for you is very simple: will you read the sentence to its end, or will you turn the page?