Schopenhauer once described a group of hedgehogs on a winter night: to keep warm they huddle together, but their spines prick each other, so they pull apart, freeze, and try again. His point was that closeness and pain tend to arrive together, and most of us settle for a lukewarm distance. 

I thought about that image a lot during my internship. One of the projects I worked on uses the football community to help reduce stigma around asking for help with suicidal thoughts, focusing on men aged 40 to 50. It is a group we know is disproportionately affected by isolation, and one that most mental health services struggle to reach. 

What I found interesting is that this initiative is not struggling to reach them, it pulled in thousands of participants across the 2025/26 season.  Most mental health and rehabilitation programmes take years to build the trust needed for people to turn up, let alone open up. 

Meeting people where trust already exists 

Traditional therapy asks us to walk into an unfamiliar room and share our feelings. A matchday does the opposite. Vulnerability is not the point of the day, it is a by-product of being somewhere you already belong. 

Football has always carried a double meaning for the men this project targets. On the surface it signals loyalty, toughness and identity. Underneath, it is one of the few settings where shared feeling is not only permitted but expected. You can shout, cry, sing, hug a stranger, and no one asks why. This initiative uses what is already commonplace rather than trying to build something new from scratch. 

Shared identity does real work 

Research shows that rigid ideas of masculinity, learned emotional restraint and patchy access to mental health services combine to make asking for help feel like an admission of failure. That creates a loop: the more isolated men become, the harder it is to reach out, and the harder it is to reach out, the more isolated they become. 

Football can break the loop by giving men a shared identity. Research by Wann and colleagues on team identification suggests that fans who see the club as an extension of themselves tend to report higher wellbeing, more optimism, and lower alienation. When a club then invites those fans to check in on each other, this is not seen as an intervention but is seen as another way of showing support for their club. 

What this tells us about designing support 

The lesson is not that football is a miracle setting, but that the design of support on offer matters as much as the content of it.  Key factors such as where an initiative is placed, who delivers it, and what social permissions already exist in that space, can help determine whether people turn up at all. 

For organisations designing support for hard-to-reach groups, the questions worth asking are: 

  • Where does this group already gather, and what emotional permissions are already in place? 
  • Can the support be framed as an extension of something they already value, rather than a new thing to opt into? 
  • Is vulnerability being asked for directly, or invited as a by-product? 

Schopenhauer thought the hedgehogs were stuck, but this project suggests that given the right setting, people naturally find ways to sit close without getting hurt. 

My internship is almost over, but this project is one that I will remember for the incredible way football communities work to reduce the stigma around men’s mental health. 

Charlotte Leung