By John Brooks AGN.
David Wheeler’s anger is clear to see.
He is 32 years old and has played for seven clubs at every professional level below the Premier League. He has seen many of his teammates struggle with depression, eating disorders, and gambling addictions.
The midfielder has also seen what he calls a “culture of hypermasculinity,” which he says is “outdated ideas of what it means to be a man” and keeps players from “admitting vulnerability.”
Wheeler, who now plays for League One Wycombe, thinks the game needs to fix this quickly. Between 2018 and 2019, the number of players who asked the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) for help with counselling went up by 50%, so his worries seem to be well-founded.
He says, “We’re leaving the door open for a fire to start in someone’s head.” But Wheeler’s feelings of unease are also shaped by his own journey.
He used to go to a therapist for help with his panic attacks, but now he’s in charge of a unique research project that he hopes will change what one manager calls football’s “Dark Ages” approach to mental health.
Dealing with nerves might be part of a player’s pre-game routine. While many players have felt “butterflies” during the warm-up, not as many have had to deal with throwing up.
Wheeler has done it this way for a long time. “I had a lot of competitive anxiety when I was growing up,” he says. “There were times when I had to throw up in the bathroom before the game or at halftime, or I couldn’t eat right, which hurt my performance.”
I didn’t deal with it well enough, so it ended up getting into my personal life. I’d have panic attacks while on vacation, shopping, or just sitting in a restaurant.
Then I started to look for help.” Luckily, those days are over now that he has worked hard to understand and deal with the anxiety that held him back in the beginning of his career. Wheeler says, “I can still feel that intense anxiety, but it no longer takes over my life.”
This work helped him get his undergraduate degree and recently finish his post-graduate research, which was supervised by Dr. Misty Gervis, who used to work with the England women’s football team. She says that the study’s results are “unique” because Wheeler’s position as a current player gives a “true reflection” of how psychology is seen in the game.
Wheeler worked with Gervis at Wycombe and met her when he was at Queens Park Rangers.
She was the first sport psychologist hired by the English Football Association to help any of its national teams. She went with the Lionesses to the 2007 World Cup and the 2009 European Championship. She also thinks that a culture that is too masculine makes players less likely to ask for help with their mental health.
She remembers a time when a manager stopped her from working with a player she thought was weak and trying to get help.
“It’s easier to be a man if you act like a butch because that creates a wall that no one looks behind,” she says.
“But what I see is fragility and vulnerability that is never talked about, never owned, and kept hidden because there is no safe place for it to be expressed, and that is a big problem.”
The FA’s coaching programmes for youth and adults now include psychology training. In Wheeler’s study, 10 top managers who have worked with national teams, Premier League clubs, or EFL clubs give their thoughts. He told them about how football doesn’t seem to want to fully accept psychological support.
One manager said that there is a “lack of honesty in football” and that “players struggle because they don’t want to be seen as struggling.”
He also said, “You still think it’s a sign of weakness.” It happened to Wheeler during his career, which began in 2007 at Lewes and has taken him to Staines Town, Exeter City, Portsmouth, MK Dons, and QPR in addition to Wycombe, where he is now. He gives a clear picture of how a macho atmosphere in the locker room can change the way people think.
He says, “I’ve seen something that was probably close to the best you could find in the Football League, and I’ve also seen something that was pretty toxic, and the difference is quite clear.”
“Sometimes it was so bad that I didn’t want to go to work every day. I didn’t want to be there because it wasn’t a good place to be.
I’ve seen players almost sleepwalk themselves into pretty dangerous situations where they’re not fit to play a match, but they end up playing because they don’t want to lose their spot on the team. At times, it feels like a boiling pot of stress, especially when the manager is under stress.
I think the fact that there isn’t a sports psychologist there adds to the shame and taboo surrounding psychological support.
“If you celebrated it and had a psychologist on staff all the time, it would be like the manager saying, ‘We have someone on our team, so if you’re having problems, talk to them and be honest about it.’ It won’t come back to me if you don’t want it to, and it won’t change my decision to hire you.'”
By not having someone, it almost seems like we don’t care about the players’ mental health or we’d rather not know about it, so if you need help, go find it somewhere else. I worry about both, but in different ways.”
Wheeler’s research says that Premier League and Championship clubs should be required to hire a licenced psychologist full-time. He says that teams in either division should be able to afford to do this, since a 2018 study said it would cost between £27,000 and £100,000 a year, depending on experience.
But he also thinks that clubs can do other things, like encourage players to do things outside of the “football bubble.”
“I think [change] comes from celebrating people’s uniqueness and encouraging them to explore their personalities and grow as people, not just as football players,” he says.
“Most of the times I’ve seen people spiral into anxiety, depression, gambling, or eating disorders, it’s because they have a very limited view of who they are.” That narrow idea is first and foremost, and sometimes only, a football player. So, if that isn’t going well, it’s all over.”
Last season, PFA members at clubs in the Premier League, EFL, and Women’s Super League were asked to fill out a confidential survey about their mental health. About 22% said they had felt very anxious in the past month.
But while it’s clear how big of a problem mental health is in the game, it’s not so clear that clubs have to help players with their mental health or that they want to.
English clubs with leading “Category One” academies are required to hire a full-time psychologist who is registered with the Health and Care Professions Council or is in the process of getting the credentials needed to register.
This is the body in the UK that is in charge of regulating the health and care professions. But the Elite Player Performance Plan doesn’t say that Premier League or EFL teams have to hire a licenced performance psychologist to help senior players.
Those rules only apply to academies. At least half of the clubs in the Premier League hire psychologists to work with their first-team players, but respected people in the game think more can be done.
In an interview with The Football Psychology Show in 2021, Wycombe assistant manager Richard Dobson, who set up the club’s psychology programme, which the FA’s former psychology lead called the “biggest in Europe,” said that the system lets clubs “play at psychology.”
“What I’m seeing now is that a lot of people who just graduated from college are getting jobs at club academies to check boxes, because the Elite Player Performance Plan says you have to have a psychologist,” he said.
“So, the clubs say, ‘Well, we’ve brought one in, but we’re only paying them pennies, so we’re doing psychology now.’ They’re not, though. It’s not quite that easy. You need to know a lot more about psychology.”
Wheeler is one of a growing number of current and former players who want people to know that football can help with mental health. In an interview with AGN Sport in August, Davide Ancelotti, an assistant coach for Real Madrid, said that all top players would soon have their own psychologists.
Wheeler agrees that more help for mental health is needed, but he is also aware that the system could be abused.
“Even players who can pay for top psychologists can be easily fooled by someone who is good at marketing themselves on YouTube,” he says.
“This happens at Premier League clubs.” “They hire people who have written a book or have a lot of followers on social media, but who don’t have the skills or qualifications to do what they say they can do safely.”
Even though players like Tyrone Mings, Jordan Pickford, and Jack Harrison have been open about working with psychologists, Wheeler thinks that change needs to happen faster.
“I do think the tide is turning, but it’s moving so slowly it’s frustrating,” he says.
“One of the managers in my study said, ‘We’re still in the Dark Ages. How many more young men are going to fail before we get our act together?'”
This is what worries me, and it’s why I want things to change quickly, because I can’t help but think about how many people will be hurt in the meantime.
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