Professional Footballers Australia have ramped up their mental health support to players at home and abroad after the “seismic shock” of the coronavirus crisis left them fearing for their livelihoods.
The PFA had already seen a 400 percent surge in players access their mental health services in the three years leading up to the current shutdown.
But that number has grown again in the weeks since leagues around the world were shut down, often leaving Australian players overseas high and dry.
Even in the A-League, seven clubs have stood down players and staff, leaving them without any income.
“It’s been like nothing we’ve ever seen before, clearly,” PFA CEO John Didulica told the new FTBL Year Zero Podcast. “The scale of what we’re having to deal with is unprecedented.
“A large proportion of players are challenged not only about what the next two months look like in terms of the balance of their contracts, but also what the future might look like.
“It’s not just about their own personal circumstances but what this might mean for the league and the game. They’re concerned and rightly so.
"Nobody at this stage can crystal ball what this might look like in six months, 12 months, 24 months…”
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He added: “It’s a time of high pressure and high anxiety for everybody.”
“There’s no question that when you have such a seismic shock to your business there’s going to be a chain reaction of impacts.
"The role of the PFA is try to cushion that impact as much as we can, particularly in terms of mental health and well-being.”
About 40 to 45 percent of A-League players are set to come off contract at the end of this month without the season having been concluded.
“That’s quite a large group of players who will have quite acute issues to deal with,” said Didulica. “Clubs may be eligible for JobKeeper but beyond that there is no financial support in place.”
In addition there are about 50 international players in Australia, with 32 of them coming off contract – and few of them are likely to be eligible for JobKeeper payments if they're on temporary work visas.
“That will create a host of issues… these are complexities,” the CEO told the podcast. “There is a fair bit of individual case management that we will have to put in so their experience in Australia doesn’t become totally toxic.
"But equally so that these players, when they return home, can say the Australian football community did their best to look after us.
“I think that’s important in the long term if we want to have credibillty as a destination league.”
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Adding to the PFA’s around the clock workload was looking after the 280 or so Australians playing overseas and caught in disease lockdowns across the world.
Didulica dded: “Situations like that don’t just resolve themselves.
“Those players are spread across 35 or 265 countries so we have 35 or 36 different situations so we’ve had a lot of work just to reach out to all of those players and make sure they’re okay.
“In Indonesia we faced a really acute issue where it appeared some of the first communications from the government didn’t quite align with the reality on the ground in terms of the virus, so we had to work around the clock to get those players out.
"It takes a lot of work here at the PFA to engineer those sort of outcomes.”
He added: “I’m pretty glad the W-League finished up the week before the close down - that was one saving grace.
“But that created another problem in that we have a lot of girls playing int he W-League who now can’t take up contracts in the US and Europe - so that’s another area to manage.”
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