Andre Gomes is the latest professional athlete to get candid about mental health
By Zack Nelson
A few years ago, if someone brought up the top up-and-coming midfield prospects in world football, one of the names that probably came to mind was Andre Gomes. Barcelona certainly seemed to think so as well, when they bought Gomes from Valencia for €35 million in July of 2016.
After the departure of Xavi, and with Iniesta getting older, Andre Gomes was brought in to try to carry on the legacy of arguably one of the greatest midfields of all time. However, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
Andre Gomes struggled greatly in his first season – so much so that he was actually voted as La Liga’s worst signing of the season in a fan poll by Marca. For the last season and a half, he’s struggled to get consistent game time, and on the sparse occasions that he actually does get on the field, he’s been lackluster and hasn’t really contributed much to the team. As a result, the fans have become frustrated, and it seems like it all came to a boiling point during Barcelona’s match against Atletico Madrid two weeks ago.
Andre Gomes came on in the 36th minute, replacing Andres Iniesta, who had just suffered a hamstring injury.
Whenever Gomes touched the ball, the Camp Nou held its collective breath. It’s as if the fans felt physically uncomfortable whenever he was involved in the play, which is probably how Gomes was feeling as well. Every poor decision was met with whistles, boos, jeers, etc., and it was clear that the Portuguese midfielder had had enough.
A few days later, Andre Gomes gave a very candid interview with Spanish magazine Panenka, in which he discussed the “hell” that is his current life at Barcelona.
He said, “I don’t feel good on the pitch… I am not enjoying what I am doing. The first six months were pretty good but then things changed.”
“Maybe it’s not the right word to use, but it has turned into a kind of hell, because I have started to feel more pressure. With pressure, I feel fine, but with the pressure [I put] on myself, I don’t. The feeling that I have during games is bad.”
“I don’t feel good on the pitch” – Andre Gomes
And who could blame him for feeling that pressure? He plays for a club where excellence is the expectation week in and week out, and if you’re consistently not meeting those expectations, fans will turn on you, which can take a serious toll on a player.
He went on to say, “On more than one occasion, I didn’t want to leave my house because [of the way] people look at you. You have a fear of going on the street out of shame.
“I close myself off. I don’t allow myself to get rid of the frustration I have. I don’t talk to anybody. It’s like I feel ashamed. Thinking too much has hurt me. I think about the bad things and what I have to do”.
It’s easy to assume that professional athletes are indestructible. They’re multi-millionaires and international icons, what could they possibly be depressed about? But the truth is, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people think.
And it’s not just professional footballers, it’s athletes from around the world – In recent weeks, a few high-profile NBA stars have come forward about mental health as well. It started about a month ago, when Toronto Raptors guard DeMar DeRozan sent out a simple tweet.
At 3:06 AM on February 17th, DeRozan plainly said “This depression get the best of me”.
That’s it. Just 7 words. But those 7 words may have caused a sort-of domino effect that forever changes the stigma of how mental health issues are viewed in the sports world.
After his tweet, DeRozan’s Twitter mentions were flooded with something you rarely find on the internet – love, support, and encouragement from complete strangers.
A few days later, DeRozan opened up about his mental health in an interview with The Toronto Star. He said “It’s one of them things that no matter how indestructible we look like we are, we’re all human at the end of the day… Sometimes it gets the best of you, where times everything in the whole world’s on top of you.”
“This is real stuff,” he continued. “We’re all human at the end of the day. That’s why I look at every person I encounter the same way. I don’t care who you are. You can be the smallest person off the street or you could be the biggest person in the world, I’m going to treat everybody the same, with respect.”
“It’s not nothing I’m against or ashamed of. Now, at my age, I understand how many people go through it. Even if it’s just somebody can look at it like, ‘He goes through it and he’s still out there being successful and doing this,’ I’m OK with that.”
With some inspiration from DeRozan, Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love kept the conversation going a few weeks later by writing an article for The Player’s Tribune entitled Everyone is Going Through Something.
In it, he opened up about his own mental health, including a detailed story recounting a panic attack that he had during a game earlier in the season.
He talks about his previous unwillingness to open up as well, and how so many young men go through life being told things like “be strong, don’t talk about your feelings, get through it on your own”, and says that these values have become so ingrained into society that they’ve become invisible, like depression and anxiety in a way.
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Love calls the panic attack a “wake-up call” – one that finally made him disclose to someone what he’s been going through. He says that the Cavs set him up with a therapist, and while skeptical at first, he was surprised at how refreshing it was to talk through his issues, most of which didn’t even involve basketball.
One final takeaway from Love’s article is this quote about creating a better environment for talking about mental health:
“The reality is that we probably have a lot in common with what our friends and colleagues and neighbors are dealing with. So I’m not saying everyone should share all their deepest secrets — not everything should be public and it’s every person’s choice. But creating a better environment for talking about mental health … that’s where we need to get to.”
This is key, because it seems like something that the culture around European football is currently lacking as well.
For example, about a year ago, Aaron Lennon was detained by police under the Mental Health Act after they received calls concerning his mental welfare, and was taken to a hospital to get treated for a stress-related disorder. The event received some media attention, but not much, and some of the attention it did receive struck a nerve with fans, including a controversial tweet that included Lennon’s salary, even though that has nothing to do with his mental health.
Another example is last month, when Angel di Maria talked to Marca about how internet criticism and “memes” affected him and many other members of the Argentinian National team. It really put him in a bad place, but Di Maria says that talking with a psychologist helped him out a lot. The statement also received little real media attention and was taken as a joke by many, simply due to the fact that the headlines of most of the reports mentions memes.
These aren’t just random, isolated occurrences either. According to a 2015 study by FIFPro, depression and anxiety are very prevalent among European football players. Via Sports Illustrated, “38% of 607 current players and 35% of 219 former players reported suffering from symptoms of depression and/or anxiety. Sleeping problems (23% and 28%), distress (15% and 18%) and adverse alcohol use (9% and 25%) were also found to be prevalent.”
When you dig deeper, you can see that there are some prominent reasons for this. In an article from the Boston Globe, sports Psychologist Brent Walker gave his thoughts on how the professional sports lifestyle can contribute to mental health issues.
“The reality is that professional athletes are not different,” Walker said. “Everyone has their struggles regardless of what it looks like on the outside. We all have stuff we have to deal with. Where it gets different and difficult for the professional athletes is that it’s worst in a team sport in that, ‘I can’t let anybody know. I’ve got to be a man [or woman]. I can’t let anyone know there’s something wrong with me.”
“You’re spending abnormal amounts of time away from your family, your sleeping patterns are absolutely atrocious,” he said. “A lot of the basic well-being items that we would recommend for people, staying close to people you’re close to, getting adequate amounts of sleep. Professional athletes don’t have that luxury during the season.”
Next: Saint-Etienne heading in the right direction, for now
Depression, anxiety, and overall declining mental health is a serious issue all across the world. It’s seen as a social taboo that people should be ashamed of or afraid to talk about. But when star athletes like Andre Gomes, DeRozan, Love, di Maria, and Lennon come forward and talk about mental health, it becomes relatable to ordinary people. These are the athletes that they look up to, that they idolize, and if people can see that even these seemingly invulnerable athletes suffer with the same issues, then we are definitely moving in the right direction.