Dale Vince, the green energy entrepreneur and owner of Forest Green Rovers, has been mixing football and social causes for years. And so it’s perhaps not surprising that he is one of the partners in an initiative where GPs can prescribe a day out watching his National League team as an alternative to antidepressants.
“Our country’s facing a difficult time,” Vince says. “We’ve got extreme poverty at one end and extreme wealth at the other end, and football is the thing that binds us, it’s the thing that brings us together every week with a common purpose and a common cause. Modern life has stripped a lot from us as people and led to a mental health crisis. Football could help put that right.”
The initiative, called Football on Prescription, was developed with Simon Opher, the doctor and Stroud MP, and will give eligible patients a card which they can take to the New Lawn Stadium to claim their free ticket. Vince and Opher formed a relationship last summer when Vince door-knocked for Opher during the general election. The pair spoke about the idea while watching football together themselves. The initiative will be ready for the new season, with Forest Green’s first home game of the campaign against Yeovil on 16 August.
“Our people know how to make ticketing work and so we just came up with a simple card that we gave to GPs that they’re then able to give, in effect, as a prescription to anybody they think could benefit from it,” Vince says. “It has got all the information the patient might need. It’s got the information the GP needs. And the same for the club.”
The initiative is a form of social prescribing where non-medical methods are used to improve people’s mental health and wellbeing. The concept dates back to the 1920s in the UK, gaining more traction in the 1990s. It is an approach Opher pioneered in Gloucestershire as a GP. Opher, who is the chair of the all-party parliamentary health group, first introduced social prescribing to his practice in 2001 where he started running art sessions at his surgery in Dursley.
“We’ve got some really quite good scientific evidence now that [social prescribing] improves mental health and reduces social isolation,” he says. “If someone comes in with some stress – maybe their partner’s left or they’ve lost a very close relative – you know that they are a bit down in the dumps but they don’t necessarily need medication, and one of the issues in this country is 8.7 million people in England alone are on antidepressant medication and some people could actually get better with other activities. Social prescribing is a way of providing that.”
Forest Green finished third in the National League last season, their first after being relegated back there from League One. Both Vince and Opher hope the initiative can be extended to more lower-league clubs around the country. “Unless you’re in the Premier League and maybe Championship, most football clubs aren’t selling out every week. So it’s not like you’re giving away the chance to sell a ticket,” says Vince. “You’re just giving away an empty seat to somebody in need.”
Opher is wary, however, of extending it to clubs in higher leagues. “If a ticket costs £160 and you’re giving it out for free, you may actually increase people’s attendance at the doctor just to get a free ticket,” he says. “So we have to be a little bit more careful perhaps with Premier League clubs. But certainly we’d like to see more smaller clubs take up this idea if it works and is effective for people’s mental health.”
