'Social media takes a big toll' - Shrewsbury assistant addresses mental health in football

Shrewsbury Town have had a tough season in League One this time out, and they are all but relegated from the third tier after an extended stay. 

With poor results comes criticism, and in a modern era where players are closer to supporters than they have ever been - that can take its toll on their wellbeing. 

And Dobson, the Salop assistant head coach, spoke about the issue facing footballers in the modern world. 

He said: “It's frightening how many players suffer with mental health issues because of the stresses that are put on them in the sport. 

“You're in the public eye all the time. You can't go to a restaurant and enjoy your time without somebody seeing you there, and social media now takes a big toll on players.

“Where somebody might not be brave enough to have a pop at them face to face they can do it on their phone on their sofa. 

“No one knows where it's come from so the amount of stuff that players are bombarded with now is really tough for them to manage good and bad. 

“You play well, you get the world bombarding your phone telling you how great you are. 

“The following week you play badly, and the other half of the world is telling you how bad you are, so the highs and lows are so difficult to traverse.”

Dobson has been in football coaching for more than 20 years. 

And while he acknowledges that tactics and formations will have a huge impact on the success of a team, he believes that psychology plays an equally important role.  

That much so, he was part of giving youth players access to a psychologist when he was at Wycombe. 

He said: “There's sort of five areas really, you talk about technical, tactical and physical, which is the one that most people think about, but they don't necessarily think about the social and psychological.

“Everybody has sports scientists nowadays, every kid has access to a sports scientist, but we don't work the mind, and the mind is equally, if not more important, than the body.

“I thought, I'd love to just have an academy where every kid had access to a psychologist and was working with psychologists. 

“Dr Misia Gervis, from Brunel University, sent down her postgraduates, and within two weeks we had a psychology programme which, when we fed back to the FA what we were doing, they said to me, you do realise that this is the biggest football psychology programme of any club in Europe. 

"They said there is only Valencia and someone else in Norway. 

“We never meant to bang the gong, it was done because I believed in developing people's minds as well as their bodies, but it proved to be a brilliant thing for us and the players within our system, and we did it for several years and that's now been taken on by other clubs.”