The chair of PFA Scotland has warned that the sport is “sleepwalking towards a tragedy” over its failure to treat players’ mental health with the same urgency as physical injuries.
Mikey Devlin, 32, made the stark assessment as he drew on his own experience of depression during a playing career that took him from Hamilton to Aberdeen, Hibs, Livingston and Ayr United, and included three caps for Scotland.
“Are we waiting for the worst case scenario to unfold and then we say something needs to change?” Devlin said. “That’s insanity to me. That’s beyond comprehension that we wait for our worst fears to become a reality in Scottish football before we do something about it.”
A personal spiral
Devlin said recurring injuries were the catalyst for a serious decline in his mental health. He described a year of struggling before recognising he was living with depression, saying that at no point during that period did anyone at his clubs ask him how he was coping mentally.
“Nobody’s checking in about how you are mentally, how’s the head, do you need any support,” he said. “The type of questions you’d ask someone if you were assessing them physically.”
He described his head becoming “an unfriendly place,” dominated by anxiety about his contract, his fitness, and his sense of self-worth. Daily life oscillated between numbness and sadness. He withdrew socially, stopped answering his phone and avoided going out, finding temporary relief in drinking.
“For every up I could manufacture, there was a huge fall on the other side,” he said.
A turning point came in a conversation with his sister Rachel, who told him what he was feeling was a recognised illness and that he would eventually feel optimism again. “That was a lightbulb moment for me,” Devlin said.
A systemic failure
Devlin said PFA Scotland runs mental health workshops at every club in the country, employs a full-time wellbeing officer, and provides a 24/7 confidential support service through Sporting Chance, the organisation founded by former Arsenal captain Tony Adams. But he argued the union cannot be the only body in Scottish football taking the issue seriously.
“We need others to step up to the plate,” he said.
He pointed to statistics showing that around 75 percent of suicides in Scotland since Covid have been men, and linked that to what he described as a broader cultural tension around men discussing their feelings. He said he knew of young men from his home town of Motherwell who had died by suicide.
“My worry is that they can resort to an irreversible outcome and that’s it,” he said. “Once you take that step you can’t come back from that.”
Calling for specialists
Devlin said mental health problems are easier to hide than physical ones and harder for clubs to detect, and called for football to employ mental health specialists in the same way it employs physiotherapists and sports scientists.
“It seems utterly bizarre to me, and so far behind the times, that we don’t engage in that conversation about someone’s wellbeing,” he said.
He stopped short of telling clubs how to spend their money but said PFA Scotland’s advice, on a human level, is that clubs prioritise the health of their employees.
“How can we not see the importance of players’ mental health?” he said. “Until we see them at the same level as physical health we’ll always be swimming against the tide.”
