For many sports fans around the world, football is a way of life. A recent FIFA report published in 2019 found that there are five billion football fans around the globe, with more and more people supporting clubs everyday. Many young kids have dreams of playing football for the biggest clubs in the world and growing up to be one of the greatest ever. However, the road for these future players is not easy. First, they must get selected to a club academy, where they give up their lives as normal kids at a young age to become professional players. From there, they compete against their fellow teammates in their attempt to reach their dreams of cracking the first team lineup.
But for many, this may never happen. A study done by the Premier League in England found that 97% of academy players never play a single minute of top-flight football (Cunningham 2022). Yet, the grueling struggle of an academy player can detrimentally affect their mental health, especially after release from the club.
Negative Mental Health on the Pitch
For any footballer, there are many possible stressors that can affect their mental health. These stressors, however, are magnified for kids from nine to sixteen years old. Vincent Gouttebarge (2021), a former French football player and sports medicine expert, highlights several on-pitch or “football-specific stressors”:
- Adverse interactions with coaches or players
- Poor travel arrangements
- Decreased minutes because of poor form or injury
Injury seems to have the largest impact on players. Injury can significantly affect an academy level football player because of the competition. For these young players, every game is a competition to prove that they belong or they deserve to move up to the next level. As psychologist Nicole A. Sothern and sports-development lecturer Jimmy O’Gorman mention, when a footballer is no longer allowed to play because of their injury a player will often feel like they are missing a central part of themselves. Because an injury is often unforeseen and involuntary, players, especially at the academy level are at potential risk of becoming “psychologically depressed on a clinic level,” (Sothern et. al 2021, 642).
Mental Health off the Pitch
While the majority of an academy player’s time is spent at the club’s facilities, kids also have lives outside of football. One additional challenge to mental health is academy football players’ lack of deep emotional friendships due to the constant competition within the team to move up in the system. The majority of players’ friendships are “devoid of trust and emotional intimacy,” (Sothern et. al 2021, 642). For these players, youth squads are hopefully nothing more than a pit stop on their road to the top and there is no time to form deep friendships.
Other socioeconomic, cultural, and familial factors can affect a footballer’s mental health off the pitch as well. Often players will have to move away from their homes and live full time either on the training grounds or in hotels by the training facility. Many of these players leave behind their friends and family not only to chase their dream of becoming a professional footballer but because they are presented the opportunity to advance their family socioeconomically (Gouttebarge et. al, 2021).
What if They’re Dropped?
Academy footballers are put into the mindset that football is their number one priority, even if their chances of making it are slim to none. Social scientist Chris Platt found that players typically choose to single-mindedly devote themselves to their footballing dreams with nothing to fall back on. If these players are dropped by their academy, and more often than not, these youngsters are often under-educated, having let education take a back-seat to training.
Upon being dropped, the initial realization that a player will never see the people that they’ve built relationships with, along with the fact that these players will likely never play football again makes it doubly hard. In one interview with a former academy player, the player said, “Yeah, it was emotional…I’ve been there for five years, you know the kit man, all the lads, the coaches and you literally get told no, and it’s within ten minutes, you’ve got all your stuff and you’re out and you never see them again.” Another possible factor that can affect the immediate mental health of a youth player is the embarrassment of being told that they aren’t good enough and having to clean their locker in front of their teammates and others (McGlinchey 2022).
Recently released youth footballers often have a hard time adjusting to life outside of football, especially within the first month. When a player gets dropped permanently from an academy, a permanent sensation of “loss of athletic identity,” becomes evident (McGlinchey 2022). Researchers David Goldberg and Paul Williams (2021), found that 55% of all deselected academy players suffered from clinically high levels of psychological stress. Psychologist David Blakelock suggested that recently dropped academy football players tend to experience symptoms of anxiety, depression, loss of confidence, or even social dysfunction for at least the first month following their release from the club (2016).
For some, the experience of being dropped can lead to more than just long therapy sessions. In October of 2020, 18-year-old Jeremy Wisten hanged himself in his bedroom. This was two years after his dismissal from the Manchester City youth academy following an injury Wisten had sustained (Kelner 2021). Wisten had spent four years at the club playing through the ages of 13 to 16 before his release and was generally considered to be a top talent in the Manchester City academy.
While this is one of the darkest examples of the mental health impacts of youth academy football, there is some light that has come from it. Within the world of academy football, whether former players or parents, want change. Following the death of Wisten, many are calling for the “reframing of the attitude within academies of football to place education at the core,” (Kelner, 2021).
What Needs to be Done?
Mental health is a relatively new topic within world football. Because of this, there is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to make sure that youth academy players have good mental health and can assimilate back into the “normal world” when they are out of football. Many leagues and teams currently do not provide players and staff with ways to express their mental health and to better themselves.
With leagues and teams lagging behind, several players have taken to creating their own foundations. Tottenham Hotspur star Harry Kane has created the Harry Kane Foundation, which works with charities and hospitals throughout London to help players and others in the world of football find mental health help (Harry Kane Foundation, 2022). While just a start, foundations and charities such as this one begin to connect with much needed mental health help.
Work Cited
Cunningham, Sam. 2022. “Premier League Reveal 97% of Players Who Come through
Top Academies Never Play a Minute of Top-Flight Football.” INews. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://inews.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league-academy-players-figures-appearances-numbers-1387302).
David Blakelock, Mark Chen, and Tim Prescott. 2016. “Psychological Distress in Elite
Adolescent Soccer Players Following Deselection.” Journal of Clinical Sports Psychology. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/301231161_Psychological_Distress_in_Elite_Adolescent_Soccer_Players_Following_Deselection).
“Harry Kane Foundation launched on World Mental Health Day with aim of tackling mental
health stigma.” 2022. Sky Sports. Retrieved November 22, 2022. (https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/12717035/harry-kane-foundation-launched-on-world-mental-health-day-with-aim-of-tackling-mental-health-stigma)
“The Football Landscape – The Vision 2020-2023.” FIFA Publications. Retrieved
October 17, 2022 (https://publications.fifa.com/en/vision-report-2021/the-football-landscape/).
Kelner, Martha. 2021. “Youth Football: What Happens to Those Who Don’t ‘Make It’?” Sky.
Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://news.sky.com/story/youth-football-what-happens-to-those-who-dont-make-it-12226577).
McGlinchey, Thomas Ryan. 2022. “Being Released from a Football Academy Takes a Serious
Toll on Young Players – New Research.” The Conversation. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (http://theconversation.com/being-released-from-a-football-academy-takes-a-serious-toll-on-young-players-new-research-189196).
Gouttebarge, Vincent, Gino Kerkhoffs, Margo Mountjoy. “Aspetar Sports Medicine
Journal – MENTAL HEALTH SYMPTOMS IN PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.” 2021. Aspetar Sports Medicine Journal. Retrieved October 15, 2022 (https://www.aspetar.com/journal/viewarticle.aspx?id=542).
Sothern, Nicola A. and Jimmy O’Gorman. 2021. “Exploring the Mental Health and
Wellbeing of Professional Academy Footballers in England.” Soccer and Society
22(6):641–54. doi: 10.1080/14660970.2021.1952693
Wilkinson, Richard James. 2021. “A Literature Review Exploring the Mental Health
Issues in Academy Football Players Following Career Termination Due to Deselection or Injury and How Counseling Could Support Future Players.” Counseling and Psychotherapy Research 21(4):859–68.
