I used to be a teacher, I ended up homeless - football saved my life

The aim of this regular game, which is run by Partick Thistle’s charitable trust, is to help people do that. The two-hour sessions happen twice a week and there’s a serious structure to it – a GP and other NHS staff are on hand so the guys can access services that they might otherwise miss out on. But ultimately it’s all about the football and the effect it can have on the players, often without them even realising it.

Alex is a perfect example. He came along to the Petershill centre at first because he was homeless and lacking confidence and felt that a game of football would help get him stronger, physically and mentally. Football wasn’t even really his game, he says. When he was growing up on Maryhill Road in Glasgow, boxing was his thing, encouraged by his mother’s partner, but he thinks football has given him a better outlook on life and helped him deal with some of his past and some of his problems.

In many ways, his story is not typical – how exactly does a man who was a teacher and worked in social work end up homeless? In other ways though, he follows the pattern of many men because the catalyst for his crisis was a family break-up. Alex has also had some mental health problems in his life, beginning at an early age. “I had learning difficulties as a child,” he says, “and I couldn’t mix with other children. I was not the norm.”

His mental health problems continued into adulthood, but there was a time when things were going well for Alex. He moved to Japan where he was teaching English and he met a woman, got married, and had two children. However, when that relationship broke up, Alex found himself homeless for the first time. “I lived on a mountain in Japan in a tent for just over a year,” he says. “The Japanese people were very nice to me. They have a big heart.”

Alex then made the first of several attempts to get access to his son, who’s now 14, and his daughter, who’s 12, but it wasn’t easy. “My wife didn’t want any contact with me,” he says, “she didn’t want me to have anything to do with my kids. I went to court in Japan but lost. I went to court maybe five times and I’ve been back to Japan trying to find my ex.”

Now living back in Scotland, the whole process has been extremely hard for Alex. “I’ve had mental health issues and I struggled with stress,” he says. “I’ve got constant stress about my children, I’m worried about them. Because I’m in Glasgow doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about my son and daughter every day, if they’re in danger and happy.” Alex used to have a lawyer to fight his case but he can’t afford one now.

Another source of stress when Alex returned to Scotland was where he was going to live. At first, he found a flat in Glasgow but then he began to have problems with disruptive neighbours. “I never thought about it,” he says, “I just handed the keys in and said ‘I’m fed up with this, I’m not going to put up with all this noise’. The housing association didn’t do anything when I complained. They told me I would be better swapping a house rather than making myself homeless but I couldn’t live there. It was affecting my mental and emotional health – I didn’t want to get into trouble so I just made myself homeless.”

It was the beginning of an extremely difficult 18 months for Alex and the first night on the street was the toughest. “That was s**t,” he says. “It was freezing. I was sleeping in the city centre, I would find places. Alcoves and things, next to pipes where there was heat, and where you weren’t getting wet. I had all my possessions in my rucksack.” Sometimes he would live in hostels and occasionally, people he knew would put him up, but they had families, he says, and eventually he would have to leave. “Sometimes your friends can only put up with so much,” he says.

All of it took its toll on Alex’s confidence and it was at its lowest when he heard about the football project with Partick Thistle. He was living in a hostel and was physically unfit, but slowly the physical and the mental started to change. “The football helped,” he says. “We weren’t all friendly and sometimes there’s a lot of bad feeling, but I’ve met different people and it opened my mind; it’s also made me better at getting on with people.”

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Paul Kelly, who manages the charitable trust, has seen this effect over and over again. Just the other day, the nine-year-old son of one of his players came along to watch the game – until then, there had only been supervised visits with a social worker. Paul also tells me about another player who lived in hostels for years before coming to the football. He has now been in a flat of his own for eight months.

Paul tells me that the homeless football works in a number of ways, both practical and emotional. The practical stuff is that a doctor is on hand to help the men if they need it; the staff at Partick Thistle can also give support at meetings about benefits, housing, or other issues. Paul believes the structure of a football game helps them to bring structure into their lives away from the football pitch. “That’s really the secret of what we do here,” he says.

The emotional side is very important too. It is perfectly understandable that many of the men who first come to the football have problems with aggression and violence. On the street and in the hostels there is a fight to be the alpha male and everything can be quick to confrontation. Only the other day, Paul had to exclude a couple of men from the sessions because of their aggressive attitudes.

What the football does is offer the men a relief from all that, but it can also teach them new ways to deal with their emotions. “We deal with a lot of issues around anger – our attitude is that if you’re going to get angry, you’re going to have to stand at the side of the pitch. The men also learn that 99 times out of a hundred, you don’t get the outcome you want by being aggressive.”

Paul believes this emotional element is absolutely critical to what they do. “Emotion is a big part of it because the guys that we’re working with, they’ve taken a dent to their confidence, there’s probably an issue of communicating with people, there may be issues of addiction and mental health, and what they’ve not been able to find are things that help them identify what these challenges are and how they can deal with them. Some people might say ‘I don’t know how you manage to play football when there is so much going on in your life?’ My answer is ‘I don’t how you manage without it because that’s the point in the week when all they need to think about is the football’.”

But there’s only so much that two games of seven-a-side a week in Glasgow can do to tackle homelessness. The problem is getting worse in the city, says Paul, and he should know because, although he had a career as a semi-professional footballer with Alloa and Stranraer, he has mostly worked on tackling poverty and deprivation for many years and he’s never seen a crisis like the one we’re facing now.

“The situation has got worse,” he says. “One of the fundamental problems is the benefit system makes it much, much easier to become homeless than it used to be. Universal credit is a nightmare. It’s made homelessness worse.

“We’ve got people who are told ‘your appointment is 1.40’ and people turn up at 1.55 and they don’t get to sign on as a punishment. And you think, wait a minute, when this person’s life is in such a chaotic challenging state, cut them a wee bit of slack for 15 minutes.”

Paul has also seen situations many times where someone has had to wait six or seven weeks for their first payment, then they have missed an appointment, faced a sanction and had to wait another six or seven weeks for their second payment. That’s the danger zone where people can end up homeless.

“We’re seeing people who have family break-up and within two or three weeks are homeless,” says Paul. “The way that the benefit system is set up is to ensure that people don’t receive benefits for four, five, six weeks or more. Homelessness can happen to any of us now in a way it couldn’t have in the past.”

That’s a scary idea: that it’s become harder to avoid being homeless, that’s it’s become easier to find yourself in the kind of situation that Alex and his team-mates have been in. Paul also believes that the systems that do exist to help homeless people aren’t working as well as they should.

“In Glasgow, we struggle to get the support mechanisms to people as quickly as they need them once they are in a tenancy, things like furniture,” he says. “We’ve had people in tenancies with bare floorboards and nothing else. Our experience is that the support mechanisms are not quite there as they should be. It needs to be joined up in Glasgow better than it is.”

Paul would also like to see social services and others engaging much more with projects like his, mainly because they work (Partick Thistle’s homeless football has been running for just over a year now and they have seen 17 of their players move from homelessness into tenancy). Alex is one of them and is now in a flat. But perhaps the bigger effect has been in his head. He’s more confident now. He’s having some fun. He’s enjoying the banter on the pitch and the running around and the fact he’s fitter than he’s ever been in a long time.

There’s still a lot of pain and struggle in his life of course and it’s most obvious when he talks about the children he hasn’t seen for years and years, but he’s got back a bit of confidence and a bit of optimism. He’s also realised that the real joy of kicking a ball about for a couple of hours is that you’re just thinking about kicking the ball about. Sitting down in the dressing room afterwards, Alex , in the slow, careful language of a man who’s been through a lot, puts it this way. “It’s made life more tolerable,” he says. “It’s made life better.”