How Women’s Soccer Is Embracing Mental Health

The one thing she could not do, Sinead Farrelly knew, was talk. Nobody had ever told her that explicitly, of course. It was just something she understood. Soccer, her first time around, operated under what she can now call a “culture of silence.”

The perceived delicacy of the sport meant that principle applied publicly almost as a matter of policy. Only a little more than a decade ago, Farrelly and her peers playing in professional leagues — first the W.P.S. and then, after its dissolution, the incipient N.W.S.L — did so keenly aware of their own mortality.

“You want fans to come so the league can survive,” Farrelly said. “You can’t be sharing how bad it is or what the conditions are really like. You have to put on a show for the development of sport. You owe it to yourself, your teammates, future generations.” It felt, to her, like “living a double life.”

Something darker held the omertà in place privately, among the players themselves. Years later, Farrelly would feel strong enough to tell the world what she had endured: years of psychological torment and allegations of coercive sex at the hands of the coach to whom she felt she owed her career.

Her voice would bring about substantive change. The coach, Paul Riley, would receive a lifetime ban; her account would act as a prompt for the Yates Report, with its damning findings revealing a “league in which abuse and misconduct — verbal and emotional abuse and sexual misconduct — had become systemic.”

At the time the abuse was happening, though, Farrelly did not feel that she could tell anyone what she was going through, not even her teammates. Perhaps part of that, she said, can be explained by her nature. Now, looking back, she is frank and open and disarmingly, breezily honest. Back then, she said, she was not “comfortable with being vulnerable.”

But part of it, too, was a shared sense that saying something brings it into the world, gives it a shape and a form. “Opening those gates would have been too much,” she said, not just for her, but for her teammates as well. “You kind of operate on autopilot. You do not look at how dark it is. You kind of know that once you see something, you can’t unsee it.”

It took a car accident for Farrelly to come to terms with her experiences. Recovering from her injuries required weeks “in a dark room, alone with myself,” she said. In those circumstances, there is only so much you can do to distract yourself. It speaks volumes that, now, she describes herself as “grateful” for the crash, which is probably the best gauge of the severity of what she had endured.

It allowed her to identify a solution, a way to rebuild herself, and her life. She left soccer entirely. She did not kick a ball. She did not think about it. For seven years, she put that part of herself away.

Elite soccer has an uneven, uneasy relationship with mental health. It is, as the United States defender Naomi Girma put it, extremely good at “calls to action.” The sport knows that there are performance benefits to players’ being able to cope with the pressures under which they are operating. A generous interpretation would have it that soccer understands on some level that the same logic probably applies outside the tightly guarded boundaries of its universe.

It is less good at the action itself, the walking of the walk. The problem is not so much structural as essential. Elite sport is unapologetically cutthroat, inherently Darwinian.

Players are not only competing with opponents but also with each other: for roster spots, for prominence, for fame and glory. Coaches are conditioned to weigh players for strength and weakness, whether that is technical or physical or mental. In that environment, showing any sort of vulnerability is — to put it mildly — disincentivized.

And so, even as clubs have in recent years recognized the obvious benefits of sports psychology, they have found another problem. Installing a psychologist at a training ground is one thing; convincing the players that entering that office is not a way of signaling to your teammates and your coach that you are struggling is quite another.

Girma’s career thus far has been a rapid one — the top pick in the N.W.S.L. draft in 2022, she was the N.W.S.L. rookie of the year last season and U.S. Soccer’s women’s player of the year in 2023 — but it is still a relatively young one: Girma has only been a professional for two years.

Still, though, she has encountered the idea that a capacity to tolerate pressure can be characterized as “grit,” a quality a player needs as much as pace or vision. “It is starting to shift a little,” she said. “Plenty of players work with sports psychologists. It’s normalized to talk, and to get help.”

She attributes that in part to the willingness of clubs to pursue anything that looks even remotely like a marginal gain — her N.W.S.L. team, the San Diego Wave, employs a “wellness coach” — but believes the example set by athletes like Simone Biles is possibly even more influential.

“To see someone like her, the best gymnast in the world, talking about her mental health shows that it doesn’t mean you can’t perform,” Girma said.

The change, though, has been piecemeal, and delicate. Driven by the loss of one of her closest friends — Katie Meyer, a teammate at Stanford — to suicide in 2022, Girma has long believed a different approach was needed: not just something more systemic, but something more organic. She concluded it had to come from the players.

“Teams create families,” she said. “You want people to feel as though they have a support system. Not necessarily from the whole group, but a couple of players within it who you can feel you can turn to when you need it.”

Her answer will take shape this weekend, in a quiet hotel overlooking San Diego Bay. Girma, Farrelly and Becky Sauerbrunn, the longtime U.S. women’s team captain, will be among 20 players — including at least one from all 14 N.W.S.L. clubs — and a number of grass-roots organizations to attend Create the Space, a mental health retreat organized by Common Goal.

Given that most, if not all, of the guests are less than a week away from reporting for preseason training, it should not be a surprise that a couple of practice sessions have been scheduled.

The emphasis, though, will be on a different type of training. There will be classes, designed in conjunction with E-Motion, a community-focused counseling organization, on learning how to cope with loss, injury and retirement. The participants will be taught techniques drawn from movement therapy and somatic yoga.

“We did not want to offer just one prescribed way of doing things,” said Lilli Barrett-O’Keefe, the executive director at Common Goal USA. “It was about showing the players various different ways and seeing what works for them.”

The selection of players invited was deliberately broad. Some are at the start of their careers, on the eve of their debut seasons as professionals. Others are at the autumn of theirs, beginning to confront the thought of life after soccer. Some have been affected by grief, others by injury. All, like the league itself, are still coming to terms with the widespread allegations of sexual abuse initially prompted by Farrelly’s allegations and then the reckoning of the Yates Report.

The ambition is not only to help those in attendance, but to use it as a springboard “to start to shift the culture throughout the league,” Girma said.

The best way to do that, Common Goal argues, is through the players. According to the organization’s research, players tend not to turn to family or friends outside soccer for support but to look inward, to their teammates. “It is a way of reclaiming power,” said Barrett-O’Keefe. “It is a way of saying, ‘I can help myself, and I can help my teammates.’”

In the summer of 2022, Farrelly decided to go back to the game. She was not entirely sure she felt ready. She was afraid of any number of things: that she might not be good enough, that she might let herself down, that she might let other people down. “I’m comfortable being small,” she said. “There’s a part of my brain that is there to protect me from being hurt.”

She knew, though, that at 33 she would not have another chance, and so she took the risk. She started training with Gotham F.C. She impressed enough to be given a contract. Within a year, she would be playing in her first World Cup.

It has not been as easy as that timeline makes it sound. Farrelly has never regretted her decision to return to soccer, she said, but there were times when she was “crying every day,” when she was not sure if she could be what she once was, when the highs and the lows threatened to “overwhelm her.”

This time, though, the culture had shifted. At Gotham, she could speak. Not just to her psychologist and her somatic therapist, but to other players. She could speak to her teammates about the fact she was using a psychologist. “I had to open up and be vulnerable,” she said. “At times, that meant having a vulnerability hangover, but I’m grateful for it.”

Silence had forced her from the game; filling it helped her find her way back. She now believes, ardently, in sharing that with her peers and her successors. “We live in a society that teaches us that we are in competition with each other, that for one to succeed, someone else has to fail,” she said. “But we are starting to see what we can do if we lift each other up, instead.”

Who Do You Think You Are? Franz Beckenbauer?

Only two players — I think; this newsletter is always prepared to be corrected — have been afforded the ultimate honor of having their names attached to what might be described as an act of soccer. Johan Cruyff has his eponymous turn. Antonin Panenka is remembered every time anyone chips a penalty.

There are others, of course, but they do not transcend either geographical or generational borders. Some will label a pirouette a Zidane turn; others might attribute it to Diego Maradona. Fans of a certain age will understand what is meant by a Blanco hop, but the meaning will be lost on younger (or older) audiences.

It is probably as good a tribute as any to Franz Beckenbauer, then, that while he is not synonymous with a single move, he will forever be associated with a certain style. As the British broadcaster Mark Chapman pointed out this week, long after Beckenbauer had retired, players gracefully carrying the ball out from the defensive line were credited with/accused of behaving like Beckenbauer, something that will likely — hopefully — continue after his death this week at age 78.

The Long Hangover

In one light, Napoli can be forgiven its precipitous decline this season. It was, you will remember, the most compelling soccer story of (at least) the first half of 2023: a club, and a city, breathlessly anticipating the end of a three-decade wait for an Italian championship. So ecstatic were the celebrations that it is no real surprise their aftereffects have lingered.

In another light, though, this season is a source of some regret. The team that finally delivered Naples its first post-Diego Maradona title was one of those moments of happenstance: a set of players and a coach who dovetailed perfectly.

Since then, Napoli has made a series of eminently avoidable errors. The club had an opportunity to build from a position of strength, but instead made poor coaching appointments — twice — and spent not inconsiderable amounts of money, poorly, in the transfer market. It is currently ninth in Serie A, and will struggle to return to the Champions League next season. The party, as it turned out, was all too brief. Still, at least it was a good one.

Correspondence

The first weekend in January is, you will know, historically reserved for two of English soccer’s great traditions: the third round of the F.A. Cup; and talking about the waning, or otherwise, of the magic of the F.A. Cup.

“It seems all of the big clubs are desperate to avoid cup replays, which used to be one of the highlights for the fans,” Henry Brown obliges. “But with the overload on the players these days, the reticence is understandable. Nonetheless, the financial bonus for the little guy is more essential than ever, and it would mean a huge step down if this glorious tradition were changed.”

There are a couple of things here. The first is that, increasingly, the idea that it is only the major teams who disdain the F.A. Cup is outdated; clubs from the second-tier Championship seem — understandably, given that league’s hectic schedule — to regard it with even more contempt.

The second is that a lot of the discourse around the F.A. Cup ignores the salient fact that its primacy for previous generations can at least in part be traced to the role of television. Of course the cup occupied a position of unusual prominence for decades: For roughly half a century, it was the only soccer televised live in Britain. (We may return to this subject.)

But most of all, we should be absolutely clear that there can be no clearer proof that the financial model of English soccer is fundamentally broken than the fact that there is no greater economic reward available to a whole swath of clubs than obtaining first an arbitrary meeting with and then drawing a game against one of the elite. If the big clubs want to abolish replays, they should perhaps start by contributing more to the monetary well-being of everyone else.