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Abstract
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The deaths of Gary Speed and Dalian Atkinson, both professional footballers, have raised concerns about mental health in professional football (soccer), a sport with which I have been involved all my life, first as a professional player (for Charlton Athletic and England Youth) and later as a counsellor and researcher in my role as Director of Welfare at the Professional Footballers Association of England and Wales (PFA). Football continues to treat mental health as an area of both stigma and taboo, and, despite the growing emergence of women in the game, male domination of the sport is reflected in the prevalence of masculine codes of deflection. In addition to toxic masculinity serving as a barrier to open discussion about mental health, the sport's silence on the role that racism plays in poor mental health of footballers also hinders progress.
High-profile campaigns (including Heads Up and their partnership with the Football Association, and Mind's partnership with the English Football League) have helped to spotlight mental health issues.
Carmondy and colleagues suggest that 16% of a sample of 1034 male players reported symptoms of depression during the COVID-19 period, but with no reference to racism. Similarly, Rice and colleagues2
found more than 2279 global studies in mental health in sport that focus on stress, self-esteem, and depression, but again without any attention to racism as a causal factor. The lack of analysis of racism is primarily because these studies are mostly quantitative, and are profoundly incurious about the diversity and lived experiences of professional footballers. As a consequence, players are falling victim to a biological, symptom-based approach that is largely ignorant of the crucial structural factors underpinning players' mental health issues, particularly for Black players, who make up 30% of professional footballers in England and Wales.
Current constructs of mental health do not look at the social factors that shape the experiences of Black men inside the structures of professional football. The dominant biomedical model neglects the person-centred approach that focuses on people's lived experience. Such an approach is crucial to demedicalise mental health in sport, to empower Black professional footballers, and to use their interpretative, authentic, first-person voices as the basis for a transcultural model to mental health...
Language: en |