Football has always played a massive part in the lives of those who follow or play the game.
As Bill Shankly famously said: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that”.
It was an extreme, passionate view, and although often slightly misquoted, the power of the message remains the same as Shankly identified football’s significance to the people of Liverpool and beyond.
That bond, between the game, the team and the supporters, defines the truly great clubs, and epitomises all that is inspiring in the world’s most popular sport.
Photographer Drew Findlay, himself a Stockport fan, recognises the positive part football can play in everyone’s lives, particularly when it comes to a sense of wellbeing.
Helping tackle mental health issues, in itself something of a taboo subject in the seemingly rough tough world of the macho man, or woman, is one such area Findlay sees football playing a pivotal role.
Lower Block recognises that. Findlay’s inspiration to get beneath the surface of those struggling to come to terms with everyday living came about after losing a mate, and it is a desperately sad fact of life that more young men commit suicide than any other demographic.
Findlay identified the real stigma that surrounds mental health, an issue that should be out there, in the open, being talked about.
Lower Block supports that view. The stigma needs to be broken, but without demasculating men, encouraging men to talk to their mates, in the safe environment that football can offer, whether playing, watching, going to the pub, or just talking about the game.
Important is the escapism football provides as a fan, but equally beneficial are the life skills and resilience it teaches you as a player.
These are the rich, but sometimes sadly untapped, benefits the game has to offer.
Findlay’s own feelings and experiences paint a much clearer picture of the mind games that one minute can have you on a high, the next drag you down.
“Managing mental health can be exhausting,” he said. “Having to regulate and check in with myself can be a minute by minute task… I can have weeks where I feel fine then a sight or a sound can send me plummeting. For a brief period I can be back to where I was at my worst before the process of rationalising my thoughts starts again until the next time it happens.
“I feel lucky that with the support of friends and family I have been successful in devising strategies to manage my mental wellbeing.”
Findlay set out to share his experiences, talking worries and concerns through with friends old and new in his project ‘Yes Playa’ (Findlay’s photographs run throughout this article).
“This work is a personal journey through that process,” he said. “In order to develop the project I reconnected with people from my past as well as my present, asking them to share their experiences of mental wellbeing.
“Often feeling alone with my mental health, the intention was to open the conversation with other men in the community about the subject.
“Outside the making of a photograph, my job was to listen and share my own experience if asked. Within the process I listened to a number of harrowing stories which were sometimes upsetting.
“I also learned that success is often born out of a number of failures, the key being tenacity and self awareness.
“The bravery I witnessed was both enlightening and inspiring.”
This is Drew Findlay’s story, in discussion with Lower Block.
My name is Drew Findlay and I live in Heaton Mersey in Stockport, I grew up in Heaton Chapel, lived in Heaton Moor and often frequented the pubs of Heaton Norris in my youth. I guess you could say I’m a ‘Four Heatons’ boy. I’ve lived here most of my life apart from university and a stint coaching in the USA.
For the last ten years or so I’ve worked as a lecturer in media studies, and I’m currently a programme leader for creative industries across a couple of colleges in South Manchester. I love enabling students to develop a creative literacy while helping them develop technical skills to get them a job.
As a kid I was obsessed with football and didn’t consider a career in something creative and so I’m passionate about providing access to a creative education to working class kids.
I’ve been a Stockport County fan all my life. The first match I attended was a 0-0 draw against Torquay United in the late 80’s. I remember being really excited about going to the game, even though all my mates teased me because they were United and City fans, that still hasn’t changed!
I sat in the main stand on an old wooden seat, it was a dreadful game but I couldn’t wait to go back to Edgeley Park .
Over the years I’ve had lots of good memories supporting County. We went to Wembely four times in two years in the early 90s, we were beaten each time.
My first visit we got beat 1-0 by Stoke but my overriding memory was of the size of the stadium and the disbelief that the team that I supported were actually playing there. It really was a special place. The year after we got beat by Port Vale but the constant roar of the fans singing ‘Danny Bergara’s Blue and White Army’ was something I’ll never forget. I was hooked!
My teenage years were spent going home and away with my brother who is quite a lot older than me and had a company van so every other weekend was spent going up and down the country with his mates who all smoked spliffs and drank beer. It was pretty cool, I was probably high but didn’t know it.
Gazza was my hero growing up, that moment when he ‘Cruyff’ turned the two Holland players in the 1990 world cup was brilliant. I also loved Roberto Baggio and used to look forward to watching him on TV every Saturday morning on Football Italia. I went to watch Barcelona once and witnessed the mastery of Andrés Iniesta. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player control a game quite like him, what a player.
My Dad was Scottish and when I was really young he’d pick me up on a Saturday morning for my match then we’d go back to his flat and watch Saint & Greavsie or videos of George Best and Jimmy Johnstone. He loved ‘Jinky’ Johnstone and I even show clips of him to my son now.
I loved going to new grounds and new places. I was obsessed with lower league attendances and found the old grounds enchanting. The old stands and big imposing floodlights were great.
I loved walking into service stations proudly wearing my County shirt while keeping an eye out for other fans, especially avoiding big groups of Burnley or Stoke fans, although my big brother loved causing a bit of ‘mither’ which was always quite funny.
As I grew up I discovered all the usual things that young northern football fans find such as the Stone Roses and expensive casual style clothes.
I was always interested in the cultural connection between music, football, fashion and the sense of insecurity of working class male culture. I found all of these things pointed to something much bigger which I was frustrated about not being able to understand.
My GCSE’s were sh*t and didn’t feel very confident about my life prospects and career. It was at that point a teacher friend recommended I read George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and I felt p*ssed off about the inevitable doom of life as a proletariat, so I decided to go to university.
I ended up as captain of the university football team and had three great years studying, getting p*ssed and playing football all over the country.
As the social media revolution gathered steam I loved following the non league groundhopper accounts which coincided with Stockport’s demise into non league football. I decided to start my own football themed account which eventually became the main space for my personal work. I like looking at the football culture stuff but I always felt that it was an access point for something a little bit deeper.
Playing Sunday league football was what I loved the most, playing at a good standard with my mates, I developed and maintained friendships that have lasted a lifetime.
The inception of the project ‘Yes playa’ was motivated by my personal grief after I learnt about the loss of a long time football friend, Chrissy Greenhalgh.
It was quite early in the COVID period and I was really affected by it. I wasn’t just sad, it was more than that. Chrissy was not one of my closest friends but someone I’d been around for many years through football. He was full of energy, really funny and as hard as nails.
I felt upset that a great person and an important member of our collective childhood wrapped in shared memories of playing football was gone.
At the time I was engaged with another photography project but I felt compelled to make work that was closer to my own community.
The sense of shock was raw and I had a real desire to go back to my football community; a community that had always been there. The people that I knew and trusted and had helped raise me as a frustrated low achieving male.
Football empowered me with the confidence to punch through my personal frustration and insecurities. Now I realise that it wasn’t football, it was the people I was lucky enough to be surrounded by. And one of them was gone. And they are still gone, and that’s bad.
I knew that taking on this project was probably going to change me. The feeling I had was extremely powerful and still puts a lump in my throat and turns my stomach.
I knew I would hear things that would upset me and it did.
I interviewed people I had an emotional bond with in a time of grief. I knew I couldn’t prepare myself for that. I’d have to explore my own pain in addition to learning of the pain of others.
I met with my subjects with the intention of talking to them before taking their portrait in their own environment. I recorded our conversations on my phone, which was important as I felt another type device might become a barrier.
The interviews were unstructured and in some cases lasted hours. With both parties often exhausted I would then take their photograph.
As a typical working class lad from a council estate, football has always been a big part of my life and has always been an entry point for other things.
Through playing football I met some great people who showed me that I could have a different path. Whether that was seeing different places following County with my brother or meeting semi-pro players who’d made a few quid.
Football shaped me to always want to compete and better myself. It was a passport out of the estate, it took me to America as a coach.
In my younger years I had always felt a bit inferior because I was poor and not perceived to be very bright. Football brought another perspective and gave me the confidence to pursue the will to be a better version of myself.
My Dad was a Taxi driver who came from Glasgow. He followed me everywhere, usually picking me up on a Sunday or Saturday coming straight from the night shift driving p*ss cans home from their nights out in Manchester. He used to encourage me to apply to be a bus driver as he was worried about how employable I’d be. Football gave me a much broader horizon than that.
Growing up in the Stockport / Greater Manchester area in the 90s I consider myself fortunate to have had a rich cultural upbringing; catching the tail end of The Stone Roses, and then my generation had Britpop and Oasis.
The Gallagher brothers lived about two miles away from me and our mums worked together at the McVitie’s biscuit factory.
I never met them but their unapologetic outlook and rawness of their first few albums served to give boys like me a sense of identity and a reason to be proud of our origins. We’re not rich people but we try to be cool. The Oasis gig at Maine Road ensured that my teenage years were spent in Umbro Pro Training gear.
I love working class culture and football underpinned that. My students call me a lemon boy because of my longer hair and love of Fred Perry and a good rain mac!
It makes me quite sad that people think working class football culture is about violence and aggression towards difference. My Dad grew up as a Protestant in Glasgow and he always deterred me from sectarian viewpoints, he’d lived that world and didn’t want me to grow up with that kind of hate.
If you’re having a difficult time, please talk to someone. If you need speak to someone urgently about how you are feeling, whatever you may be going through, then please get in touch with The Samaritans, they are always here to listen.
Keep up with all Drew’s photographic work by following him on Instagram.
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