Mind games Football puts a lot of stress on players’ mental wellbeing and the authorities need to do more to help them through difficult times By JOE SANDLER CL ARKE
F
ormer Tottenham youth striker Josh Lyons was 26 when he threw himself in front of a train in West Sussex last year, having fallen into a spiral of depression after being released by the club when he was 17. Returning a verdict of suicide, the coroner criticised professional football clubs for not doing enough to support young players. For Troy Townsend, mentoring manager at Kick It Out, the story is all too familiar. “I think clubs still view academy players as a commodity,” he says. “Clubs believe they’re only looking for two to three players and the rest are just there to fill spaces.” The Lyons case, as well as the untimely deaths of high-profile players such as German international goalkeeper Robert Enke and Wales manager Gary Speed, has highlighted mental health problems in football, while also raising questions about the way young players are treated. Former Charlton Athletic winger Michael Bennett is a qualified counsellor, and is the head of player welfare at the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA). As part of his job, he visits players who are struggling to cope. In the year after Speed’s death, 57 came to him looking for help. Since then, he has continued to find himself in demand. His work mainly consists of offering support as players retire or change career. In a profession where this transition can come as quickly as a broken leg, or a coach deciding out of the blue that you’re not quite up to it, this period can be traumatic. There are around 9,000 youngsters playing in academies across the country, while more than 90 per cent of those who join a Premier League team at academy level never sign a professional contract. “In football everything is done for you. From an early age, you turn up and your kit’s there, your boots are there, then you train and go home. So if a club says ‘thanks but no thanks’ to a 17-year-old, it’s like you’ve been kicked out of your family home. “I spoke to a 21-year-old lad the other day from a second division team who was diagnosed with stress by his GP because he can’t deal with the demands of football. When I
went to meet him he said: ‘I’m burnt out. I’m like a battery that’s flashing and is about to stop working.’ He’s been playing since he was seven. That’s 14 years of being released and taken on by clubs, a rollercoaster of emotions.” Bennett’s own football career began when he was spotted by a scout from Charlton Athletic playing for his Sunday league team aged 16. Being signed up relatively late meant he had a normal upbringing and he cites his mother’s insistence on him continuing with his school work after he signed for Charlton as the main reason for his successful move from playing in the Football League to training as a counsellor at Lewisham College. Despite increased awareness of mental health in the game, Bennett fears that as clubs look to recruit younger players, the pain of being dropped will increase. “Players today are in academies at the age of 12. When I was playing you were still able to socialise with your mates and play for your school and Sunday league team. Now young players are quite isolated. All they can do is play and train for their club.” Townsend, who works as a coach and runs a football academy in his spare time, echoes these sentiments. “I’ve put players into the pro-
fessional game and seen them fall out of it, or move from club to club. I’ve had to build players up who think they’ve failed and told them they can go back into the football world. There’s a lot of good work being done by the PFA and others to support players, but when they are released there’s a lot more that could be done.” At 17, he was let go by Millwall and didn’t receive any support from the club. Having had his heart set on a career in the game and not paying much attention in school, the news left him devastated. “When I heard I was being released, I felt like my whole world was crashing down. My life had been geared toward becoming a footballer and that was taken away from me.” Townsend’s son Andros has a strong chance of making the England squad for this summer’s World Cup. Another son, Kurtis, was a promising striker at Wimbledon when he was killed in a car accident while on the way to a match 12 years ago. Townsend felt unable to ask for help at the time, and feels that others are in a similar position. “Losing Kurtis gave me my darkest moments. I was in a place that I never thought I’d be in, and I didn’t know how to get out of it,” he says. “There are helplines now, but when I was in my dark days I wouldn’t have called because I didn’t want to open up to peo-
ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM DOUGHTY
MENTAL HEALTH
32 WSC
325_Mental_Health.indd 32
05/02/2014 15:45
“If a club says ‘thanks but no thanks’ to a 17-year-old, it’s like you’ve been kicked out of your family home”
Internal dialogue Ian Redford’s autobiography reveals the inner turmoil of a player who struggled with depression throughout his life before committing suicide By ALEX ANDERSON
N
umbed by reports that Ian Redford had taken his own life – his body was found in woodland on January 10 – I couldn’t help remembering that he scored the winner in my first cup final. I was 12, he was 21 and that 1981 Scottish League Cup helped Rangers and me through a nine-year championship drought. His equally late and classy winner in Mönchengladbach, in the 1987 UEFA Cup semi-final, is arguably the greatest moment in Dundee United’s history. A teenage Redford remains the last Dundee FC player to score four in one game. He also made a veteran’s substitute appearance in Raith Rovers’ legendary 1994 League Cup final win over Celtic. It seemed in keeping with his intelligent attacking midfield style that Redford employed no journalistic help in writing his autobiography, Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. Published last November, it was instantly serialised by the Daily Record. A family man who had scaled such football heights, run various businesses and even made the cut at a pro golf tournament was now a successful author. That he suddenly found life unliveable exemplifies the mercilessness of depression. Movingly, his book is as much self-diagnosis of that illness as football biography. The sports psychology jargon of “skillsets”, “outcomes” and “mental cores” provides a fragile coping mechanism as he relentlessly psychoanalyses his life. Extended descriptions of everything from Old Firm crowd noise – “so loud it actually lifts the ball and keeps it off the ground” – to his thoughts while scoring a 1984 goal for Rangers, shows a perspicacity rare in ex-pros. Knowing he subsequently worried the book may have been too revealing, you can’t help speculating about what happens when such sensitivity is internalised. Redford misses three Scottish Cup finals and his chance to play for Scotland through suspensions and injuries. Later careers as an agent, golfer and exporter of water to postSoviet Ukraine (with former Ipswich and St Johnstone team-mate Sergei Baltacha) fail to flourish. But by the second chapter it is clear he had always been wildly over-achieving. An audiologist provides the foreword. At age six Redford was diagnosed as completely deaf in one ear, partially so in the other and warned off sport. He concealed this throughout a career which suddenly seems miraculous. In dressing rooms he couldn’t keep up but consequently appeared aloof. Team meals or bus trips were physically draining as he couldn’t hear the wise cracks or who made them. He
PA PHOTOS
ple I didn’t know. I’m a very private person and when you have people like that, football needs to reach out to them, rather than turning to organisations.” The programme run by Bennett is set to expand in the coming years, with the FA heavily investing in mental health awareness, as well as looking to train current players in other skills to prepare for their retirement. On March 27, League Football Education, a sister organisation of the PFA, will co-sponsor the Create Your Legacy event at Warwick University which aims to put young sports men and women in touch with other careers, as well as further training and education opportunities. Bennett is enthusiastic about the event but says that more needs to be done: “When a player is at a football club they have a duty of care to that player. The question is where does that duty of care end?” Townsend feels football needs to acknowledge its other side to prevent another case like Josh Lyons. “As glamorous as the game is, it also has a dark side. I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about that. I know people who have turned to drink or drugs because of the pressures, and we need to find a way of supporting those individuals.”
Above Ian Redford at the height of his Rangers career in 1981 with the Scottish League Cup
partly attributes his last-minute penalty miss in the 1981 Scottish Cup final to social strain induced by the traditional pre-match getaway. His dismissive image was compounded by his reputation as a rich kid. His father had financed his Perthshire juvenile team and opponents from inner-city Dundee were welcome in the Redford family swimming pool. But his workaholic father provided the pool for his youngest son, diagnosed with leukaemia at two and dying at just seven. Ian had just begun secondary school and suffered survivor guilt for the rest of his life. His parents used alcohol to numb the trauma, the family dynamic thereafter laced with drunken recriminations. Rangers bought him in 1980 for a Scottish record £210,000. He wanted to go to Arsenal or Spurs, to escape his childhood. But his Rangers-supporting dad dragged him to Ibrox the moment Dundee received an offer, then waited outside as his overwhelmed 19-year-old meekly signed for £150 per week. Ian Redford always carried too much burden for too little reward. The full triumph of his life, already memorable to thousands, was revealed just when he most needed some payback. Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head by Ian Redford is published by Black and White Publishing, £15.99
WSC 33
325_Mental_Health.indd 33
05/02/2014 15:51