At a windswept and rain-soaked St George’s Park, the Professional Footballers’ Association are holding their annual conference, discussing mental health in the game.
Deep in the Staffordshire countryside, the players’ union is discussing the issues affecting many of its members, while drawing up plans and support mechanisms to help footballers cope with the pressures of the game and deal with the void left when their playing days are over.
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The PFA now has dedicated 24-hour helplines set up for members to call when they are at their lowest ebb, with a national network of counsellors and residential rehabilitation centres for those who have turned to other distractions to deal with their mental illness.
It’s a far cry from the days when a PFA official told former Norwich City and Leicester City forward Darren Eadie — at the time dealing with his own mental issues following the end of his playing career due to serious knee injury — ‘well, isn’t mental health just the new glass ankle, used as an excuse not to play?’
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is our governing body and I’m getting comments like that? How far away from reality are these people?’” Eadie recalls to The Athletic. “That was the way the PFA was back then — run by dinosaurs. I hope it’s different now, and I believe it is. I hope that archaic thinking has gone.”
To an extent it has — partly thanks to Eadie’s honest and brave decision to make public his own battle with mental illness via a revealing newspaper interview conducted by his former Leicester team-mate James Scowcroft in 2012.
Eadie revealed the strain he faced when, not long after his £3 million move to Leicester in 1999, a challenge from Charlton Athletic’s Scott Parker left him facing several sessions under the surgeon’s knife and a battle to save his career. The Norwich academy graduate, now 44, explained how he struggled to cope with the heartache of being told his career was over at the age of 28, and the impact on his family as he struggled with depression and crippling anxiety.
In that 2012 article, Eadie’s wife Kelly explained that her husband had once told her he ‘could never see himself being happy again’. Eadie is in a much happier place now, he says, although he admits he still has some dark moments.
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“I still have bad days,” said Eadie, who is fronting a new YouTube series called FC Kitchen, which focuses on improving the physical and mental health of football fans, including encouraging them to ditch the pre-match burgers and half-time pies.
“I think when you’ve been there and suffered from [mental health issues], you learn your own ways to deal with it all. You realise there is light at the end of the tunnel because you’ve come out of the other end before.
“You learn your own triggers and how to deal with it, what you have to do. Until you learn those things, you haven’t got a clue. It’s different for everybody — there is no right or wrong, you learn your own ways of dealing with that. You learn to deal with everyday life.
“It’s helped me deal with other things in my life. I lost my mum to a brain haemorrhage 18 months ago. She died within two weeks. The things I have gone through probably helped me deal with that a lot better than I [otherwise] would have done.
“For me, these things don’t make people weaker — if anything, they can make people stronger. It seems strange to say that but you learn to deal with those hardships through difficult times.”
Former Hull City striker Dean Windass and Arsenal hero Paul Merson are among a host of players who have admitted they faced mental health struggles during their careers and beyond, and Eadie believes there have been big improvements in care for players struggling to cope with mental illness and depression.
“I think there is still an awful lot that can be done,” says Eadie. “It surprises me that the biggest participation sport in the world is still behind other sports in terms of mental health provisions. I look at cricket and rugby and they have a far better provision than football.
“The problem in football is that you need a little bit of anxiety and you need a bit of angst to make you a good player. Players are genetically built that way, where they have that within them.
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“You need to be successful in sport, but when you are no longer playing that sport it is about not letting those feelings bubble over. Football is very good at putting the last game behind you. You have a poor game — don’t worry, you have the next game to focus on. You get on with it and bury those feelings.
“I think that is the problem with elite sport — when you have a loss of form or an injury, you bury it away but it has to come out at some point. That’s when it becomes more difficult to deal with, because you’re not dealing with those thoughts or feelings at the time.
“The PFA now have 24-hour helplines. I wanted to speak to someone who had been through what I had been through. No disrespect to the Samaritans because they do a fantastic job, but they couldn’t understand the background of a professional footballer. For me it didn’t have to be someone who was massively qualified in those areas. It was just about having someone who could listen and would understand what I was talking about and the environment I was in.
“It has changed, it has got better, but the PFA could do a lot more. There could be more support for players and, most importantly, their wives, families and children. It is hugely difficult for my wife and family to know what to say and what not to say around me because it has a massive influence.”
That may have been the reason Eadie turned to Scowcroft, a friend as well as a team-mate, to tell his story.
“Darren was very open with me and it was a story he wanted to tell,” recalls Scowcroft, who now works in recruitment at Ipswich Town as well as doing media work.
“It was quite brave of him. I spent all afternoon with him and the story he told me was devastating — a real eye-opener. I’d known him for a long time, we were team-mates at Leicester and I knew he had a bad injury that ended his career, but it sent him into a very dark place.
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“As soon as he opened up and started to talk, I don’t think he has looked back since.
“When football is pulled away from you like that, it’s impossible to make the transition smoothly. As team-mates, we didn’t really know what he was going through. We could see it must have been hard for him with the injury. He was a very talented player, and everything was going well until the injury, but we didn’t know the extent.
“The problem with being a footballer is that everyone perceives you have the best job in the world and are well paid, which it is, but there is also the pressure of being expected to perform every day. Sometimes that pressure can be too much and a lot of people feel it.
“There wasn’t anything from the PFA back then and I think Darren was a pioneer. He pushed the PFA hard. I can remember being in a Crystal Palace dressing room, just turned 30, and the PFA came in and spoke about various things and took my email address to send me some information, but I didn’t receive anything.
“If I was the PFA, what I would do now would be to make every player aged 30 or over sit down and talk about their future and be made aware of what is ahead of them, to help bridge the gap, because it is hard mentally to go from dedicating your life to football to having very little out there for you.”
(Photo: Steve Mitchell – EMPICS via Getty Images)