FA 'Heads Up' campaign

Neil Graney, Assistant Professor at Durham University Business School, explores how we can tackle mental health in football.

At the beginning of May this year, the Football Association (FA), alongside mental health charity Heads Together, launched its ‘Heads Up’ campaign.

The idea is to use the influence and popularity of football to show the world that mental fitness is just as important as physical fitness. It aims to generate the biggest ever conversation around mental health to drive awareness and change with regards to the alarming number of men that are affected by difficult mental health.

The campaign, officially launching at the FA Community Shield on 4 August 2019, has already begun to involve footballers and celebrities in this discussion, such as England manager Gareth Southgate, England international footballer Danny Rose and the Duke of Cambridge. In fact, a feature documentary featuring these, plus numerous other famous faces, aired on the BBC which looked to spark conversations around the issue of mental health in relation to football. This is only the beginning of the campaign, and it will continue into the 2019/20 season.

This campaign is something not too dissimilar at all from not only my research area, but also my personal life. In fact, I have used my own personal narrative to shape my research areas. I was a young footballer, growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s, in the North East of England, and experienced the highs and lows of a footballer that didn’t quite ‘make it’.

Since then, much of my research has reflected upon how the effects of isolation, rejection and failure contributed to, and escalated to, more than a decade of undiagnosed mental health illness. My latest research paper in this area, entitled My Child, the Athlete, won the ‘best paper’ award at the Annual Open University Sport and Fitness Conference.

The focus of the research is mental health and wellbeing management in professional football academies in the UK. It aims to contribute to the expansion of understanding mental health in elite athletes through a high-quality, systematic study. It takes into account six key areas: the importance of culture, defining mental health in an elite sport context, developing specific sport metrics to monitor mental health, considering mental health as an important resource, further understanding the elite sport environment and developing organisational structures to break stigma around mental health disclosure.

Then from a management perspective, the research challenges the role and influence of organisational culture and strategic leadership in the development of young ‘elite’ players. I have already completed an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) workshop with Sunderland AFC’s Foundation of Light (the charity arm of the football club) and will be working with other clubs in the future.

My personal experiences, and my research activities, have led me to also develop a study module for students at Durham University Business School focused entirely on sport business management– the Global Sport Business module. In this, students develop a better understanding of the main contemporary issues affecting sport organisations and athletes across the globe. There is a heavy focus on the duty of care of athletes within the module,which has gone on to inspire a number of students to conduct their own research into mental health and wellbeing issues in a number of different sports across the globe, including national organisations in the UK, the United States and New Zealand.

As well as continuing my research into football and mental health, I am also currently writing a chapter for an upcoming book, entitled Person First, Athlete Second. The chapter will consider how professional football clubs manage the mental health and wellbeing of their young, elite players.

It will specifically explore how club management and coaching staff create working environments for full-time professional athletes, in which young athletes are also expected to perform.It will also look at how young elite performers manage the expectations placed on them in high-performance settings and consider the impact of associated pressures on their general mental health and wellbeing. It is vitally important that we understand the role stigma plays in how readily young elite performers are willing to disclose their mental health concerns and openly access relevant support.

It is essential that we learn more about mental health and wellbeing of men and athletes, both in and out of football. Mental fitness should be treated the same as physical fitness, and there certainly needs to be greater emphasis on this in young elite athletes. The FA’s ‘Heads Up’ campaign is a welcomed start to sparking the discussion around this issue, and encouraging young men to disclose their mental health concerns and access the support that is available to them.

To find out more about this research, and other research from across the School, please visit durham.ac.uk/business.