The Brazilian striker has been threatening to score all game. He’s narrowly missed a few shots at goal already. Other attempts have been blocked by the Argentinian defender who has been putting his body on the line in a desperate attempt to keep his country in the game. The relentless Brazilian attack continues as a midfielder passes to the striker again who pivots, smashes it with his right foot and watches as it screams into the back of the net.
This may sound like a scene from the 2018 World Cup in Russia, but it’s not. This is the annual European Association for Sport Integration (Easi) football tournament held in the north of England last week where teams from the UK, Holland and Norway competed. This year it took a World Cup theme with each of the teams allocated a World Cup country to represent. The overwhelming majority of players in this tournament have received treatment for mental health problems and use football as a means for managing ongoing issues.
“I’ve been coming to this tournament for 10 years,” says Saskia Van de Hoeff, 41, from Holland. Van de Hoeff has depression, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. She is one of a handful of women in the tournament. Since she started playing football 10 years ago, the sport has had a significant impact on her life.
“When I was a kid, I was always picked last and bullied,” she recalls. “I felt like a nobody. When we came to the tournament, Hans, our carer, said I was captain. Now I feel important and needed. It doesn’t always feel like that. Sometimes you feel: ‘What am I doing? What am I here for? This planet doesn’t need me.’ With [football], I think, ‘OK, I can do something and it makes me feel good’.”
More than 20 teams travelled to Barnsley Football Club in South Yorkshire for the tournament, which was organised by South West Yorkshire partnership NHS foundation trust. The home team from Barnsley represented Brazil. A team of asylum seekers and refugees from Eritrea and South Sudan living in England – called Afro Boys – were crowned champions, despite playing as Australia in the tournament.
Sport can help in people’s recovery, help to manage symptoms and can improve the quality of people’s lives, research has shown. Football delivers social inclusion, helps physical health and improves people’s mental health. The Mental Health Foundation promotes physical exercise to improve people’s wellbeing. The organisation points to studies which show that exercise can be as effective as medication or psychotherapy when treating depression.
“Football saves lives,” says Colin Dolan, who set up the Mental Health Football Association to connect community groups across the UK. “It saved mine without a shadow of a doubt. If it wasn’t for football, I’d be dead, or in a gutter.”
Hannah Burton, physical activity lead in mental health services for the South West Yorkshire partnership NHS trust, has seen the impact football can have. “Football builds a sense of team spirit and the teams become a network. It gives men a platform to talk about mental health problems.” She talks about one man, Ian Henry, who was really unwell with paranoid schizophrenia, struggled with eye contact and saying hello when she first met him eight years ago. Now, he holds down two jobs – one at the trust – and is an advocate for other people coming through services.
Henry says he can see the progress he has made since he was sectioned for the second time in 2008. “I haven’t relapsed in 10 years and that’s thanks to sports – being happy, meeting new people, getting out and about, and going to new places. I don’t notice my schizophrenia now. I’m a person again. Today my mind’s on stuff – that’s how it helps people.”
Dolan, meanwhile, almost didn’t make it to Barnsley for the tournament. He is a manager of a team from Everton (Portugal in the competition) but is going through a bout of depression associated with his bipolar disorder. “I’ve been in bed more days than I care to remember over the last nine weeks,” he says.
“Because of this tournament, I was encouraged by the lads phoning and texting me. I had to come for them. It’s given me a great boost. I don’t know what I’m going to be like in three days’ time but I’m feeling positive today for the first time in nine weeks.”
