Mental health awareness week: How Bradford City helped me feel joy again

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At every Bradford City game this season, I have felt lucky.

What happened on the pitch, though compelling — a record run of home wins, a title challenge, automatic promotion to League One via a 96th-minute goal in the final game of the season — has felt secondary to the fact I have been able to feel it. Genuinely feel it.

The routine cup games, the freak red cards, week after week, I was so grateful to feel it. This matters again. I’m so happy.

Bradford City’s Romoney Crichlow celebrates with fans on the pitch following the team’s promotion on May 3 (George Wood/Getty Images)

I have struggled with my mental health since my teens. There is too much to unpack here — the bullying, the anxiety, the depression, the autism diagnosis in my mid-twenties — but the result is that I spent many years with my self-esteem so shattered that all there was to do was lock myself away. I did that so well at university that some of the people I lived with didn’t know I existed until months into the term. For many years, that has been how I have lived my life.

For all that time, I felt loneliness with an ache bordering on the physical. Of the few frameworks we have to discuss loneliness — the widowed elderly, new mothers, children whose anxiety never abated after the pandemic and who live out their lives online — none are really comfortable for someone in their twenties.

There is no easy way to remedy that feeling, either, when socialising, as a neurodiverse person, can be so exhausting, fraught and painful. At some point, I subconsciously wrote my life off.

From the ages of 15 to 21, as running football blogs turned into a full-time journalism career, my love of Bradford City was one of the most intense things in my life. As a kid, I ticked it all off: club bedding, posters on bedroom walls, walking out with the team as a mascot. Bradford City was the first thing I thought of when waking up and the last thing I thought of before I went to bed. That relationship was so consuming that I half-wished I could turn it down. I thought it would be that way forever.

Of course, life happens. Since my teenage years, Bradford City have been relegated to League Two, chased out an owner, finished 9th, 15th, 14th, 6th — losing in the play-offs — and ninth again. Including caretakers, there have been 14 managers.

In truth, I don’t recall all that much of it. I might have been there for it, but I can’t profess to have been mentally present.

When my mental health has been at its worst, Bradford City matches have just been a backdrop to all my internal noise, and grief, and anxiety, and existential lurches, and guilt at all of that when there is so much suffering in the world.

My brain felt rigged with tripwires and trapdoors, and faceless players would move in front of me as I tried to avoid stepping on the creaky floorboards, lost in my own thoughts.

I spent mornings flopping between going and not going to matches, changing my mind at the second everyone had to be out the door, crying before leaving. Sometimes, I felt so mentally fragile that just getting through matches was all I could hope for. I broke down in tears the minute I got home from covering a Leicester City game because of the exhaustion of putting on a mask for the world. I would watch my own City unaffected by goals, unable to take any of it in, disengaged but going out of habit.

I’ve long felt that the biggest paradox of managing depression is that you have to spearhead your own recovery when you have never felt less able to do so. Yet last summer, I resolved to do things differently. I joined sports clubs, teams, choirs. I tried — sometimes painfully — to let life in. Sometimes, though, change comes from the things that have been there all along.

“I trust this team with something as important as my joy, even after they blow 2-0 leads against Swindon and Chesterfield” (Katie Whyatt/The Athletic)

First comes Joe, sat to the left of my new season ticket seat. Over the season, we go from watching the first half of the first match in silence to an easy friendship, the first friend my own age I’ve made since leaving school. With Joe, I celebrate City’s goal in the 1-1 April draw with Notts County louder than any goal for probably a decade. His birthday fell on the same week I was consumed by Taylor Swift and I made him a friendship bracelet that read League 2 ❤︎ 4 Ever, but I was too sparing with the beads and it broke as he tried to get it on his wrist, which on reflection probably told us how long we’d be spending in this division, but at least it tickled him.

Then comes Tom, and I leave the FA Cup game I attend with him elated that I was able to lose myself in the day when I wouldn’t have been able to a year earlier.

Tom introduces me to the Tinpot Tour away day crew. There is Jon, who, on our first away trip, predicts that Notts County will end their five-game winless run against City with the words “Doctor Bradford will see you now” (County win 3-0).

There is Ivo, who has flown in from Argentina and, during the course of his stay, climbs the ranks from celebrity to cult hero. Results drop off so badly on his return to South America that fans Crowdfund for him to come back. There is David, the glue holding the whole group together, and his nephew, Oliver, who moves through life with a relentless, contagious joy, even after a draw with Chesterfield, having been two goals up with 20 minutes remaining, that leaves the rest of the car in silence.

Each week, I think back to the nerves of that first away trip, to Notts County, when we barely knew each other, and marvel at all the adventures we’ve had since: Barrow, Birmingham, Port Vale, Chesterfield. And they do feel like adventures, even when I’m not with them. It opens up a new world for me and, at each stage, regardless of the result, I feel lucky, thankful.

I find joy in picking them out on TV when they’re pulled into the celebrations with the players after a last-minute winner over Salford. At Birmingham, in a cup semi-final against one of League One’s most expensive squads, we’re swept up in the stakes and the occasion. Even at Port Vale, when City are 2-0 down after half an hour, I feel lucky that it all means something.

The odd thing about it all is that what it takes to be a good football fan is the antithesis of what you need to manage anxiety: excessive worrying about the future and endless analysis of things beyond your control.

People with particular sets of skills find themselves, by fate or chance, applying those skills locally, and we all project onto them whatever we want them to be. At some point, their achievements become yours and how special it is when we see ourselves reflected in them. Maybe hearing from two of them, Jamie Walker and Antoni Sarcevic, on their own mental health challenges reinforced that bond.

Sometimes, I’m struck that I trust this team with something as important as my joy, even after they blow 2-0 leads against Swindon and Chesterfield and I come to the conclusion that I wouldn’t trust some of them with their own passports in an airport.

But I’ve already trusted them with something so much more valuable than that, and they have responded by giving me a life.

In any case, this means so much because I decided, at some point, to let it.

What a privilege to be well enough to do that, and how wonderful that experience can be when it is shared with other people. I have never felt luckier than I did this season, when football became a site of healing. The past six months have brought some of the greatest joys of my life.

As the season has finished, I’ve wondered what the weeks without matches will bring. I probably hadn’t, until this season, understood fully the lifeline that football presents for the people whose social lives are oriented completely around it. Perhaps those people cut best to the heart of what it all means: strangers coming together to create something meaningful.

I have thought a lot this week about those people, and much of life we close ourselves off to because we think we know how it will end.

Life is found in the gap between reality and who we think we are, who we allow ourselves to be; depression, too, takes root there. In those spaces, we hurt and dream. The same is true for football, but there, the hope seems easier to come by.

Each summer, it imparts the same lesson, and one that I probably should have heeded sooner: there is always chance for a new story.

(Top photo: Katie Whyatt celebrating Bradford City’s promotion; by Katie Whyatt/The Athletic)

If you would like to talk to someone having read this article, please try Samaritans in the UK or U.S. You can call 116 123 for free from any phone

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