They play in the most-loved league in the world but how many Premier League footballers actually enjoy their jobs? It is a question that Danny Donachie, a performance coach working with players from the top flight down to League One, has regular reason to ponder.
“I spoke to a Premier League footballer last week,” Donachie tells i. “It was the first time I’d met him and I asked whether he still enjoyed playing football and he said he loves it, he loves every moment of playing.
“I was absolutely flabbergasted because it’s one of probably a handful of players I’ve heard that from.”
Donachie, 49, speaks from deep experience. When he left his role as director of medical services at Everton in 2021 he had spent two decades inside clubs – including spells at Sunderland and Aston Villa – and he identifies a significant gulf between the outside perception of what a footballer’s life is like and the reality.
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It is a question which has received fresh attention this month with Aaron Lennon detailing his mental-health struggles in a newspaper interview and Manchester United’s Raphaël Varane describing elite football, with its endless schedule, as “a washing machine” and lamenting that “the player is gobbling up the man”.
In his time at Everton, Donachie – a student of Buddhist teachings – introduced yoga sessions and once took Leighton Baines on a Himalayan retreat. This quest for balance is something he now explores in his podcast Lobster Brain: in a recent episode Tim Howard, the ex-Everton, United and USA goalkeeper, reflects sadly that: “I stopped playing and I became human again.”
To achieve balance, Donachie says many top-performing athletes create an alter ego.
“With Tony Bellew, he says he’s Anthony at home and Tony in the ring,” he says of the boxer with whom he has also worked. “I’ve heard that from many athletes, musicians, all kinds of high-performing people.
“It reminds me of what Varane said. He was saying he’d lost his individual identity. His whole identity is being a footballer so he’d lost the balance between the two.”
The son of Willie Donachie, the former Manchester City and Scotland defender, Donachie had an early lesson about the pressure footballers face to perform one Saturday morning when he saw his father eat breakfast with “sweat patches on the armpits on his shirt”. He adds: “It shocked me because it made me appreciate he was feeling nervous.”
That anxiety is greater today. “Boys are five when they go into an academy and they’re there probably four or five times a week and it becomes a big part of their lives and because it’s so serious at that age they lose the joy and the fun,” he remarks. “Because the money is so great now, it just adds pressure from all angles and there’s social media as well.
“I work with a lot of players who deliberately aren’t on social media but there’s no way of avoiding it. There’s one player I know who felt he did well in a game, didn’t even look at social media and then one of his friends phoned and said, ‘Have you seen what they’re saying about you on social media?’ and it sent him into a spin.”
Another factor that Donachie mentions is the absence of fun in today’s football. David Moyes, another recent guest on his podcast, discussed the role alcohol once played in forging bonds and Donachie reflects: “I’m not in any way advocating alcohol, especially for athletes, but there probably need to be new ways found to replace that.
“My dad’s teammates from the 70s are still his best friends. I can’t see that happening in the game now and that’s a huge difference. Because there are so many different players from different cultures, it’s common for them to not integrate as a unit as much.
“It’s more difficult because of the transient nature of the game: managers aren’t there very long; sporting directors might change quickly; staff members change quickly. And it seems there’s less of a connection to what the club itself means as well.”
As a consequence, he sees players seeking support beyond the dressing room. “They create these entourages to be able to give them that support they’re missing from the team itself.”
There are positives. Donachie cites the joyfulness of the South American players he has worked with – “because of where they’ve come from, nothing scares them” – and he is hopeful that Manchester United’s “groundbreaking” treatment of Jadon Sancho, now back playing after addressing problems related to both his physical and mental health, might prove “a great case study for other clubs”.
That said, he ends with a warning that an underlying “stigma” towards mental health persists in an industry where patience is scarce and results remain everything.
“There are a lot more resources now, such as meditation apps, but in football clubs generally I don’t think it’s yet maximised enough to help the players because the focus is so much on just winning the next game.”
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