Young people helping to tackle poor mental health through Premier League Inspires Challenge

Participants from Cardiff City FC Community Foundation have joined forces with more than 200 young people from across England and Wales to create a mentally healthy environment at their football clubs and in their communities, as part of this year’s Premier League Inspires Challenge.

The Challenge is one element of the Premier League Inspires programme, which clubs run on a weekly basis to support 11–18-year-olds who may be at risk of not reaching their potential as they move through the education system and early adulthood.

The Premier League Inspires Challenge empowers participants to take on a social action project and make a difference to the world around them.

This season, young people were tasked with raising awareness of mental health and wellbeing in their communities. Cardiff City FC Community Foundation representatives developed a project on how to improve mental health and well being.

The social action project centred around arranging a weekly games of 5 a side football to help keep people active and preoccupied on sport rather than negative thoughts. It is proven that staying active and social connection helps mental health. This event was designed to give participants the opportunity at halftime everyone to get food, refreshments and sit down with each member of of the team to start important conversations about mental health.

Kai, a participant from Heolddu Comprehensive School, said:

"I thoroughly enjoyed the whole day and it was great to go around and see different ideas and projects that other communities had come up with."

Although our social action project may seem quite simple, we think it would be really effective. We felt that it was unique in the fact we could do the project weekly. There would be huge benefits in getting people out playing regular football but also talking about how they feel in a safe comfortable space and environment."

Having come up with their mental health social action ideas, Cardiff City FC Community Foundation participants joined hundreds of young people at the Premier League Inspires Challenge celebration event at Wembley Stadium [on 25 April], where they shared details of their activity with teams of their peers representing 45 clubs from across the Premier League and the English Football League.

The Cardiff City FC Community Foundation Premier League Inspires Challenge team also explored the positive work the Community Foundation is already doing to support mental health awareness, including our Fit Bluebirds programme and Premier League Kicks provision.

This Challenge builds upon the Premier League’s ongoing Inside Matters mental health campaign and the League’s commitment as a signatory of the Mentally Healthy Football Declaration in 2020, which brought together all UK football organisations to help create a mentally healthy environment across the game.

Premier League Charitable Fund Chief Executive, Ruth Shaw OBE, said: “The Premier League and Premier League Charitable Fund are committed to working with professional football clubs, fans, players, communities, and partners to remind everyone that it is okay not to be okay and that it is vitally important that we keep up the conversation on mental health.

“Through the Premier League Inspires Challenge young people from across England and Wales have developed some brilliant ideas to create positive, mentally healthy environments at their football clubs and in school, at home and in their communities.”

Launched in 2019, Premier League Inspires creates life-changing opportunities for young people who have been identified by their schools as needing extra support to engage with activities, helping them to develop the personal skills and positive attitudes needed to succeed in life.

Using the power of football, the programme helps to prepare young people for further education and employment through a series of face-to-face mentoring sessions, workshops and social-action projects.

The Community Foundation began its Premier League Inspires delivery in 2019 and since then has supported 1699 young people through 4312 sessions in 30 local schools.

This season, 45 professional football club community organisations across the Premier League and English Football League are delivering Premier League Inspires sessions at their stadiums, in local schools and at alternative educational settings, with partnership support from the Professional Footballers’ Association.

More than 29,000 young people from across England and Wales have received more than 125,000 hours of targeted support through the programme to date.

To find out more, please visit premierleague.com.

To learn more about our Secondary Education provision, click here.