GoKawiilVincent Gouttebarge raises awareness about mental health in professional football.Credit: Gouttebarge
Vincent Gouttebarge played professional football in France and the Netherlands for more than a decade before retiring in 2007 and concentrating on a medical-research career. Familiar with injury during his sporting days, he now works as medical director at the International Federation of Professional Footballers (FIFPRO), which is a players’ union, and as chair of the International Olympic Committee’s Mental Health Working Group, alongside his research at the University of Pretoria and Amsterdam University Medical Centre.
As the 2026 men’s football World Cup starts in the United States, Canada and Mexico, he spoke to Nature about what the game’s biggest tournament means for the physical and mental health of the players who compete in it.
Can the ‘steroid Olympics’ show the sporting community how to support athletes better?
What do you understand from the inside about the health of footballers that is hard to see from the outside?
Footballers are not superheroes — they can be exposed to many health conditions. Musculoskeletal injury is well known, but symptoms of mental-health issues are also prevalent. That is why I chose, years after retiring, to look at the mental-health challenges for players both during and after a career in professional football.
The World Cup is about to begin. What does it do to players’ mental health?
Being selected for a national team and competing at a World Cup is obviously positive. But it depends very much on how the competition goes — whether the person is playing or on the bench, whether the team is winning. You also need to look beyond the competition itself. After the World Cup, players need to be back at their clubs very quickly. If they are lucky, they have one or two weeks off. For many, even that is not feasible. There is no recovery period between two seasons.
Is this tight schedule a health problem, not just a performance one?
Yes. The match calendar — all the domestic and international competitions — puts a huge burden on the players, not only physically and physiologically, but also emotionally and cognitively.
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