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“You can have four or five physios. Why have you got one psychologist?”: Molly Bartrip on football, anxiety, and learning who you are outside the game
- Sophie Hurst
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
This articles discusses themes of mental illness, including anxiety, depression and eating disorders.
Every time Mental Health Awareness Week comes around each year, the football world gets a bit predictable. Our social media feeds fill up with the same bold graphics and reminders telling us to look out for each other.
While those campaigns are well-meaning and important, the actual conversation around mental health in football usually stays right on the surface. It ends up feeling miles away from the exhausting reality of what it’s actually like to live through mental illness, especially while you are trying to perform on the biggest stage.
The Reality of Struggle
When we sat down to chat with Tottenham Hotspur defender Molly Bartrip, the first thing that struck us wasn’t just her bravery, but how completely candid she makes it all feel. She speaks about panic attacks, anorexia and depression with a real and raw honesty.
“They were saying, ‘You don’t have to go back out,’ and I was like, ‘No, just give me a minute.’”
She recalls a panic attack she had at half-time during a match against Manchester United a few seasons ago. While the rest of the team were listening to tactics in the changing room, Molly sat alone, trying to remember how to breathe while the coaching staff told her she could sit the rest of the game out.
Even though a panic attack leaves you feeling entirely wiped out and empty inside, Molly chose to stand up, walk back down that tunnel, and play the whole second half anyway.
Yet, when she looks back on it now, she doesn't try to wrap it up as a heroic story, but instead, she talks about the reality of learning to live with anxiety every day. It’s about getting to know your own mind, learning how to forgive yourself when you make a mistake, and realising that recovery is about reclamation as much as as getting ‘better’.
Losing Who You Are
“Every day I probably wake up with anxiety. Some days are better than others.”
It’s powerful, to anyone who has struggled with the burden of anxiety, to hear a top player in the game speak so candidly about the impact it has on her every day life. Of course, in an elite environment, there are added pressures which likely contribute to anxiety as well as navigating a whole personal life outside of the sport.
Players are expected to put on world-class performances week in, week out, while carrying a mountain of hidden stress, from the constant worry of being dropped from the squad to the awful, hateful comments that land in their phones as the league gets bigger and meaner.
“It felt like somebody else was controlling me.”
Molly, evidently, understands her own mind so well, and it really shows when she talks about the difference in her experience between the anorexia she suffered from as a teenager and the deep depression that hit her later in her twenties.
Bartrip’s struggles with anorexia began after her first England Under-15s call-up at thirteen, when she got injured while away at camp and suddenly went from the excitement of being selected for England to feeling completely out of control, and that was where things started to spiral.
At first it was throwing away lunches at school, to which it then became every meal, until eventually one of her friends noticed what was happening and told her mum, who took her to the doctor that same day. That was when she was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.
"I had no idea what anorexia nervosa was"
Molly was already in elite footballing enviroments, but still didn’t have the language to understand what was happening to her own mind and body. It says a lot about how important education is for young players, especially in environments that naturally rewards good performances.
“When I was depressed, I didn’t recognise myself anymore.”
After leaving Arsenal for Reading, where she would help the club win promotion to the WSL at just eighteen years old, football kept moving quickly around her even while things mentally were beginning to slow down. From the outside, she was succeeding, yet internally, something had shifted.
She described first noticing that she “felt off”, and remembers telling her mum to which she was told, quite reasonably, that she would probably feel better in a few days. Except the few days stretched into weeks, and eventually into something much heavier than temporary sadness or burnout.
After another doctor visit, Molly was diagnosed with depression and anxiety at the age of 21, and this brought a whole different kind of fear because it didn't feel like an outside enemy.
Molly describes that while fighting anorexia felt like battling something separate, something that had taken over her body, depression felt like it was coming from inside, it was completely herself. Whilst it may sound like a small difference, the impact becomes losing who you are, and therefore, having to find a way back.
Coping With The Certainty of Failure
Identity is integral to us, as people, but also to the wider footballing world. Player identity is integral. Yet knowing who you are as a player, and as a person, is the key to personal and career success. For Molly, the thing that ties all her struggles together is the way the football world blurs the line between who you are as a person and how well you play on the weekend until you can't separate them anymore. When your whole happiness and self-worth comes down to just being a footballer, the moment you get an injury or lose your form, your whole world collapses because you feel like you are absolutely nothing without the shirt.
Looking at the game today, Molly laughs with a lot of real respect, but also a bit of worry, when she sees the teenagers breaking into the WSL. The skill levels have gone through the roof over the last ten years, which is great for a higher quality and more competitive game, but ultimately it turns the sport into a cut-throat business where young local girls have to fight against the absolute best talent from all over the world just to get a spot on the bench. While this growth is exactly what older generations fought so hard for, it leaves behind a lot of quiet heartbreaks and players left behind that nobody ever talks about.
“We prepare players for success, but I think the biggest thing is preparing them for potentially not succeeding.”
This is a massive blind spot in academies right now. Whilst they spend hours preparing young players for the game, they often ignore the emotional tools needed to survive the disappointment when things go wrong.
Football is a career full of few highs, and lots of lows. You have to redefine what success is to you, and not measure it against win, a missed pass, or a missed trophy. A football career is never a smooth ride, but is instead a line of setbacks, like being left out of the squad, having your contract ended, or even as simple as losing a match. As the youth system gets more ruthless, teaching young players how to handle rejection is a vital shield needed, not just to protect young player’s mental health, but also give them the tools, emotionally, to cope with failure.
Finding the Person Underneath The Footballer
“This season is probably the first time I’ve felt like I’m not just Molly the footballer.”
One of the most touching moments of our conversation was when we discussed separating football, and the person behind the kit. Molly admits that she is only just learning who she actually is away from the pitch.
It is so easy for fans to forget how easily football can become your whole world, especially when it has been a key pillar of your identity since childhood. Children in academies - and any intense sport or activity for children (football, dance, acting) - are trained, naturally, to tie their self-esteem, their friendships, and their daily routines entirely to their dedicated activity, which inevitably creates an environment where they measure self worth against getting chosen.
“I’m a sister, a daughter, a partner. I love baking. I love fashion. There’s so much more to me than football.”
Building an identity around football is integral for all players. Football is a short career, and for women in football, a career, post footballing career, is necessary. And more than that, having enjoyment and purpose in things outside football, whilst still playing professionally, not only helps you perform better, but also improves your mental wellbeing. You don’t become all consumed by a naturally all-consuming job. It sounds so incredibly simple when Molly lists those things, but a huge number of professional players spend their whole careers completely cut off from that realisation.
This is why Molly is so passionate about making sure young girls are taught about life outside the game in their mid-teens, rather than forcing them to go through a massive personal crisis in their mid-twenties when the sport eventually moves on without them.
Treating The Mind, Like You Would An Injury
Molly makes a brilliant point when she compares mental health to looking after a physical injury, noticing that football culture - and systematically as a society - always expects your mind to just get ‘fixed’.
In the physical world, clubs completely accept that players are rarely at one hundred per cent health. They manage old injuries all the time with taping, lighter training days, and special plans to help them play through the pain.
“When I was younger, if I made a mistake, I’d disappear. I’d stop wanting the ball. If I make a mistake now, I’m like, give me the ball again.”
When Lucy Bronze famously played through the Euros with a broken bone in her leg, the medical staff didn't act like it wasn't there; they just worked around it so she could perform.
Molly thinks mental health should be treated the exact same way. She doesn't see her daily anxiety as a sign that she is broken forever, just as something she has to look after and manage. After years of hard work, she has trained herself so that when she makes a mistake on the pitch, she doesn't want to hide anymore, but instead, she wants the ball straight back so she can try again.
Leaning On Shoulders
The loneliness of living through mental illness in a competitive environment can be made so much worse by people ignoring the issue. Molly talks about the support from her teammates, and how vital that has been to the culture at Spurs. “Finding her people” in the likes of Martha Thomas, and those who just “get” how to manage Molly’s anxiety, in Bethany England.
Molly recalls following a panic attack during training, Olivia Holt asked her what a panic attack actually felt like inside her body. Molly notes this as so impactful that she wanted to cry, because nobody had ever bothered to really ask before.
“Some people just kind of move away.”
This shyness is inevitable, because people are so scared of saying the wrong thing when someone is hurting, that they often choose to say nothing at all, which often just isolates the person who is isolated.
Leaning on those around you, and communicating ways to help, should the time to support need to come to fruition, not only do you help yourself, but also those who may be struggling in silence.
Fixing a broken system
“You can have four or five physios. Why have you got one psychologist?”
This simple question hits the nail on the head regarding the massive imbalance in professional football.
Molly is incredibly thankful to Tottenham for their support and how caring their staff are, but her view of the wider industry is heavy. It makes no sense that a club will hire a whole team of specialists to look after a player's hamstrings, but expect one single psychologist to carry the heavy emotional burdens of a whole squad of human beings.
She also points out a big difference between a sports psychologist, whose job is usually just making you play better, and a proper counsellor who can help you with real life.
Players don't just leave their family problems, breakups, or grief at the training ground gates when they drive in. Yet, the help football offers is sometimes too reactive over proactive. Whilst the role of a sports psychologist is vital for mentality around performance, a counsellor can also be game changing, both on and off the pitch.
Starting Her Own Legacy: Mindball
As a result of these exact holes in the system, Molly started Mindball, a project designed to change how youth academies teach kids about their emotions. Knowing she couldn't run a massive charity by herself while still playing in the WSL, she kept it small and focused on running educational workshops for academy players discussing mindset, wellbeing and mental health.
By giving these young players simple ways to calm their nervous systems, talk through their sadness, and remember that they matter as people regardless of their match ratings, Mindball is doing the work that the big clubs have ignored for years. Molly has even started bringing parents into these rooms, knowing that creating a safe, open home is the only way these kids can safely process the massive pressures of the modern game.
Mindball isn’t about structured or information-loaded sessions, they are open conversations to discuss and improve the culture and experience of young players in the game. She is an active leader, competing at the very highest level, while openly managing multiple difficult mental health conditions in real-time.
Molly finishes with a simple message for anyone struggling to "keep fighting" and let their loved ones in. Molly is the epitome of a fighter, of strength, bravery, proving people - and herself - wrong, and is living evidence that things do get better.
To anyone struggling with mental illness, of any strength, please reach out to those around you, or the wonderful charities doing exceptional work.
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