Roman Kemp: ‘Compassion and connection at the heart of football can help prevent suicide’ | Soccer

“I go to football every week, all my life. Home, away, England away, all of it,” says Roman Kemp. “And there is something about it that is transcendent. It almost feels like religion to me. Like if you go on holiday and you go into a church, even if it’s empty, you can feel the energy it’s got in there. A football stadium is the same.”

Kemp, the kind of Gooner who performs his own statistical analysis of Arsenal’s season (“I look at the league and I do a side-by-side comparison of points gained, points lost”), brings to his passion for football the same all-encompassing enthusiasm that has made him a star of TV, radio and podcasting. And he believes that the game, and its unique place in society, can play an important role in addressing another subject close to his heart: suicide.

On Wednesday the Premier League is launching an initiative, Together Against Suicide, which seeks to bring attention to the topic and better highlight the support available to people who experience suicidal thoughts. It will work online and in grounds, where 11 clubs will trial spaces for people to access information. This is the fruition of a plan devised by Kemp and his friend the Tottenham chief executive, Vinai Venkatesham (they met before he left Arsenal), and a scheme he believes “puts compassion and connection at the heart of football and something I really believe will make a difference to the fans that need it”.

Kemp’s best friend, Joe Lyons, who was the producer of Kemp’s Capital Radio breakfast show, took his own life in 2020. The following year, still during the pandemic, Kemp made a BBC documentary about the experience and used it as a springboard to explore how young men dealt with mental health issues at a time when they were skyrocketing. Along the way Kemp revealed he had been diagnosed with clinical depression as a teenager and had experienced suicidal thoughts.

“I always say depression lives within everyone and some people just deal with it better,” the One Show host says. “Mental health is a living thing that lasts throughout the entirety of our lives. It’s something that you’re just constantly trying to get better at.”

Roman Kemp (centre) with his best friend and colleague Joe Lyons (left) who took his own life in 2020. Photograph: David M Benett/Getty Images

Kemp points to the statistics that show suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 50 in the UK, and that this demographic is to be found in plentiful supply at football matches. He believes there needs to be a shift in thinking beyond a simple message of “talk about your mental health” to helping people to find the right kind of support. His aim and hope is that the new scheme allows people with suicidal thoughts to understand better what help is available and perhaps have the crucial first conversation with someone who can help.

“Something that I have learned along the way is that when someone makes that first conversation, when they say: ‘I think I need some help here,’ the likelihood of taking their own life drops significantly,” he says. “It’s being able to have a proper conversation with someone that can show you the reality of the situation you are in.

“I’ve been in the situation where I’ve had mental breakdowns, I’ve had suicidal thoughts, I’ve been at dangerous points. And when someone just breaks it down for you and when someone is there just to calm you down, to make you realise that you’re OK, the change is massive. You then know, OK, if I have that thought again, I can go back to that place and I can do it.”

Kemp is the son of Spandau Ballet’s Martin Kemp. He speaks well on the topic, the privilege and preconceptions of being a nepo baby and the visible desire he has to prove himself (on his new role as a Sky Sports presenter he says he is “fully aware” that people will be asking: “Why is Martin Kemp’s kid fronting a football show?”). Perhaps unexpectedly, however, he has become in his own right an ambassador for the topic of suicide, another position that can be challenging to hold.

“If there’s a game that I can’t go to, I’ll be in the pub watching,” he says, “and a regular, normal thing is for someone to come up to me and say: ‘Roman, I tried to kill myself last week.’ It’s intense, but I kind of signed up to it. I’m not a doctor, though, and I try never to give advice. I always say they need to find someone proper.”

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Together Against Suicide is one step towards making that journey easier and, Kemp hopes, something that helps to reduce stigma around the subject. “Every time someone comes up to me and talks to me about suicide, the No 1 thing they do is they mouth it, they go: ‘Oh, you talk about …’ And I’m like: ‘What, suicide?’ And they nod. It’s the biggest killer in our world, in our demographic, and we can’t even say it. So it’s amazing to me that the word suicide is now going to be out there, as big as possible. This programme is not called something else that just looks like mental health. I think that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned actually, it’s about normalising the word.”

Kemp says the best slogan for the scheme he had heard was devised by his mother (Shirlie Kemp, once of the 80s pop duo Pepsi & Shirlie) who said that clubs should see it as giving something back. “Every week we ask for your support, so don’t be afraid to ask for ours”, was her phrase. This is logic that Kemp believes can hold more broadly and he returns to the idea that the communal experience of football commands an authority few other places can match. “Football holds the biggest place in my heart, it’s the constant in my life,” he says. “I just feel like it’s so untapped as a community. It doesn’t know just how much of a difference it can make.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org