Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
At Oxford United’s home win over Hull City on 5 November, Head of Media Ryan Maher was excited to tell me that 100 people had signed up for the club’s event the following Monday. As I enter the Kassam Stadium six days later, Maher is buzzing around doing three jobs at once. It turns out the number of participants has doubled in six days. The room will be at capacity in an hour’s time.
This began in preparation for World Mental Health Day on 10 October, for which Oxford United created a magnificent and moving video. They wanted to follow that with something more personal that continued the conversation around suicide prevention, a Can We Talk? campaign. This is the first Oxford United mental health workshop. The club is working alongside Oxfordshire Mind and The Joey Beauchamp Foundation.
Oxford United is a club that has been affected by suicide. Joey Beauchamp was one of the most talented players in the club’s history, a Manor Ground hero who played more than 400 games for the club. In February 2022, when Joey was 50, his brother Luke found his body. Joey had taken his own life. “I just told him that I loved him,” Luke says in the Can We Talk? video.
Jack Badger was a footballer for local non-league side Abingdon United and a huge Oxford United supporter. He was one of twins and had five siblings. In September, Jack’s mum Sharon got a phone call from the police to say that a body had been found on the train tracks at Challow that morning. Sharon instinctively knew what had happened. Jack Badger was 24 years old.
Oxford United wanted to pay tribute to Jack and, during the 24th minute of their home game against Burnley on 28 September, a minute’s applause rang around the Kassam. Throughout the game, manager Des Buckingham wore a black hooded jumper with a message, “Boys get sad too”. That it became a news story in itself would only help to raise more awareness.
“We all have a role to play,” Buckingham tells me before the workshop event gets underway. “The fact is that, standing on the touchline, I am a little more prominent and thus able to get that message out, whether that’s to people in the stadium or otherwise.
“The more we can make things like this visible, the more we can help people understand the work that is being done in this space now and the more that people who are suffering can see that they are not alone. If I can play a tiny part of that, we owe it to the supporters and the community to do it.”
This summer, Oxford United signed midfielder Will Vaulks after he rejected a new deal at Sheffield Wednesday. Vaulks was front and centre of the Mental Health Day video, in which he sits down a chair on the centre circle and begins to tell his story. When Vaulks was 13, he lost his paternal grandfather Tom to suicide. Just 13 months later, his mother’s father Hywel also took his own life. At 15, Vaulks knew the impact of feeling unable to speak about mental health struggles.
“My personal experience is losing people to suicide,” Vaulks says, and his work in the area is extensive and admirable. “That was the end result of poor mental health. The earlier you can notice those small signs, the better you can help yourself and help others. Because then you might not end up losing family members, as I have.”
“It says a lot about him as a person,” says Buckingham of Vaulks’ work. “Football traditionally wasn’t an environment where you could speak about mental health, but even in the modern world it can be seen in some quarters as a weakness. We’re trying to quash that. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a young player or a senior player, if you have a role model who is confident enough to feel safe when speaking out about those issues, it will have a massive impact. People will look at Will and think ‘If he can, we can’.”
The room on Monday evening is diverse. It contains the young and the old, women and men, small groups and those who have come on their own. Some participants will be there because they are looking for help for their own mental health, others because they are seeking tools to help others close to them and some simply wanting to know how to help anyone at all. The audience contains supporters, members of the wider community, Oxford United players and club employees. All have the same broad belief: we have to look after each other a little more.
The workshop begins with an introduction from Oxfordshire Mind, a mental health charity, that details their own work and provides information about where people can seek help and support according to the needs of their situation. There is then a talk by Luke, a mental health professional, about the five steps to wellbeing. This is deliberately relaxed and offers broader tips about how to reduce stress and make connections with others, two strong measures in improving mental wellbeing.
There is then an extended panel session during which Buckingham, Vaulks, Beauchamp and Oxfordshire Mind CEO Jess Willsher all answered questions about how they manage their own mental health, ease the pressure on themselves and how they could do better.
Buckingham tries to walk outside for a short while with earphones in at both ends of the day and doing it near water helps to clear his head. Vaulks says that moving away from his friends means that he uses car journeys to ring them and chat about nothing in particular, which calms him. The point is obvious: if those in the public eye can speak openly about the need to focus on their mental health, it sets an example to others.
The final session sees attendees at their different tables break out to have conversations with each other. They might focus on tips they have taken on board during the evening or simply have a friendly chat, introduce themselves and ask how each other are doing. If there is any awkwardness at the start, within a few minutes the room is buzzing.
The first obvious aspect of the workshop is how simple the whole process is. Of course it took organisation, some advertising and the time of those panel members, but comparatively it was remarkably simple to get 200 people in a room to speak and learn about a worthwhile cause and important topic with a fortnight’s notice.
Were this a community hall down the road, the turnout would not be the same. That is the power of a football club. They are deeply important pillars of their community and they are important to enough people that they become influential. They can be leaders of social change as well as facilitators of it.
Oxford United 1-0 Hull City (Tuesday 5 November)
- Game no.: 33/92
- Miles: 198
- Cumulative miles: 5,413
- Total goals seen: 100
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: Oxford United’s three-sided stadium. Watching in from the outside is like peeking in at someone else’s joy, like seeing into a lounge from the street on Christmas Eve.
“Even being here tonight, I hope that shows the type of club that we are, the type of coach that I am and the type of environment we’re trying to create,” says Buckingham. “Speaking openly here isn’t a weakness. It shows that we are willing to be vulnerable. That will come with scrutiny, but we don’t care. If it can help people then it is the right thing to do.”
Secondly, this isn’t the only thing that Oxford United will do; that is important. There will be other initiatives announced and they will change and save lives. As Vaulks tells me, organising one thing and spreading the word is not nothing. But there is a chance to go above and beyond here. You see the difference being made in action.
“It’s brilliant that the club is willing to do it,” Vaulks says. “I’ve played for a number of clubs and not every club wants to. But what football does is to bridge a gap. It has made people want to come here. I think if this was just a regular mental health workshop held somewhere else then we would have had over 200 people here. But we have to get them in.
“Football has to make peace with that power. My main thing is that we cannot just talk; there has to be action. We have to put systems in place, through that action, that tries to stop people taking their own lives. That’s my mission.”
It’s obvious to say that this stuff matters and that football can, and must, make a difference. This week is the EFL’s Week Of Action, during which the governing body and its clubs demonstrate the myriad ways in which they can help to make life better for so many. As the EFL say, 49 million people in England and Wales live within 15 miles of an EFL club, more than four in every five people. This is not just a way of getting to them; it might just be the best way.
It also works here more than at most clubs because they know tragedy and they know the importance of mental health provisions. The importance of the work is reinforced by the video that includes Will, Luke and Sharon. Oxford United have the platform and the power; that applies to every club. Oxford United exists in an environment in which precedent suggests people are less likely to talk; that applies to every club. Oxford United have a personal connection to making it work. Thankfully that is not the same everywhere, but Oxford can rebuild something out of loss.
“Sometimes people just do not know where to go,” says Buckingham. “Sometimes people are worried about speaking to friends and family because they don’t want to burden them with things. So these types of events hopefully highlight that there are multiple avenues in which to seek support and solace.
“This is one of the most neglected areas, not just in football or sport but in life. And it’s becoming far more prominent now than it ever has been, for many different reasons. If we can play a small part in raising awareness to even helping one person, that makes a huge difference.”
You hear that line a lot: helping one person is enough. It’s entirely appropriate, of course, because it helps to personalise and individualise the work and also because it doesn’t attempt to move mountains with a single push. You start with one person and a movement grows. It’s also wrong: Oxford United can and will help far more than one person. But it starts there.
At the end of the evening, the microphone is briefly handed around to anyone who wishes to say a few words. The last contributor is a gentleman on one of the front tables, who has come by himself. He explains that he has been in a dark place and sought help. He initially believed that professionals and treatment was out to kill him, not help, but has come to terms with his diagnosis and is now improving. He is no longer afraid of the stigma.
The guy doesn’t want to tell the room anything that he has learnt on this Monday evening and he certainly doesn’t want to try to pass on advice. He just wants to say thank you: to Oxfordshire Mind; to Oxford United; to Des and Will; to the people on the table who he’s just had a chat with.