The Duke of Cambridge: "Once you start speaking about fitness, we all want to go to the gym and stay fit – well why don’t we do the same with our heads? Keep mentally fit as well"
Sunday 16 February 2020 14:40, UK
Aston Villa fan the Duke of Cambridge sits down with John McGinn to discuss the Heads Up mental health campaign and its importance, plus a revelation on his current favourite player...
The last two weekends has seen the Premier League supporting the Heads Up campaign - along with the FA and EFL - which encourages football fans to 'kick off a conversation' about their mental health and that of others.
Over the last few years, the Duke of Cambridge has campaigned for better mental health awareness and as president of the FA, has been spearheading the current Heads Up initiative within football.
Sitting down with Aston Villa midfielder McGinn, the Duke discussed the aims of the campaign and why it is important.
He said: "Hopefully a few people would have seen a bit about Heads Up by now, but effectively, it's been a season-long campaign with the idea being to get people talking about mental health and kick off a conversation.
"We built a little bit of a platform with Head Together a few years ago where we tried to chip away at the stigma and taboo of mental health. One of the last bastions of maleness that seemed to be quite difficult to reach was the football community.
"We felt that there was an awful lot of opportunity here with football - 16-odd million people around the country follow football - and I thought we could use the power of the sport and really elevate mental health to another level and allow people to have that conversation and understand that it's OK to talk and it's OK not to be OK.
"Those sorts of conversations have started, culminating in the FA Cup final being renamed, effectively, the Heads Up FA Cup. I think that's going to be quite a nice thing to hang the campaign on for the year.
"Having all the leagues come together - the FA, Premier League and EFL - makes it a pan-football statement and pan-football project and I think that's very powerful. Uniting football behind one core message, being able to reach fans from the ones who live, eat and breathe football to the ones who sit on the sofa and play FIFA every day, I think we've got to get that full spectrum of fan.
"It's also about getting role models in football to speak out so it gives permission and approval to those fans to go 'my heroes are talking about it and they're great role models. I can do that too, I can go to my teacher, my family, my friends and tell them I'm not feeling so good today, I'm struggling with this or this happened at work today or at home'. It's just generally building that conversation up so people feel they have the ability and permission to speak more openly about it.
"You're talking about physical fitness and mental fitness and once you start speaking like that, it suddenly starts resonating with a lot of professional people as well as it does with people who don't want to think about their mental health or haven't thought about it.
"Once you start speaking about fitness, we all want to go to the gym and stay fit - well why don't we do the same with our heads? Keep mentally fit as well."
Surprisingly, the Duke of Cambridge has been an Aston Villa since a young age and explained why he chose to follow the Midlands side.
"It's a long story," he explains. "Growing up at school, there were a lot of people around me who were Man Utd fans, Chelsea fans and a few others, but I didn't want to be like the rest of the crowd.
"I had a friend of mine who took me to an Aston Villa vs Bolton when the likes of Paul Merson was playing and I thought if people like him can play as well as he does, and knowing the struggles he was under at the time, I thought this was a club I could support.
"I was also born in 1982, the year we won the cup, so I feel like the history and pedigree around Aston Villa has always been quite close."
McGinn also took the opportunity to answer an on-going debate in the Aston Villa dressing room - just who is the Duke's current favourite player?
"That's a horrible question!", he jokingly replied. "I don't want to say Jack (Grealish) because everyone says Jack, even though he is amazing and he's playing really well, but I'm going to go with someone else.
"You're up there John so you get a mention, but I want to say Tyrone at the moment. The story of Tyrone and where he's come from and what he's now achieving, I'm so proud of him.
"He's been very vocal about his challenges and what he's done and he's also very alive in the community. I see his tweets and I see how inclusive he is to everybody and I think he's a really great role model."
The Heads Up Weekend, taking place on February 15/16, will see every football team from across the Premier League, English Football League, The National League, The Barclays Women's Super League, The FA Women's Championship and The FA Women's National League dedicate their matches to Heads Up.
