The candidate other candidates recommended, specialist leadership for one of the most important roles in football.
Overview
The Professional Footballers’ Association is the union for current and former professional footballers and scholars across the Premier League, Women’s Super League and English Football League.
Player wellbeing sits at the heart of its work. The PFA provides confidential mental health and emotional support alongside club workshops, counselling, rehabilitation services and a 24-hour wellbeing helpline.
The appointment of a new Director of Wellbeing was an important leadership search for an established service supporting professional footballers throughout their careers and beyond.
Challenge
The PFA already had an extensive wellbeing provision. The task was to find a leader who could guide its continued development as the pressures facing professional footballers kept changing.
The scale of the service underlined what was at stake. During the 2023/24 season, the PFA made more than 330 wellbeing interventions with members, while around 530 current and former players received mental health support through Sporting Chance, its wellbeing partner. Behind those numbers sits the full breadth of what players can face: injury, performance pressure, anxiety, addiction, gambling, online abuse and career transition.
Few roles in football are as significant, as visible or as important as Director of Wellbeing at the PFA. The brief demanded proven leadership across wellbeing and mental health, experience of elite sport or another high-pressure environment, and strong safeguarding knowledge, combined with the credibility to build trusted relationships with players, clubs, practitioners and governing bodies while protecting the confidentiality and independence that effective wellbeing provision depends on.
Solution
Executives in Sport Group delivered a specialist sports wellbeing executive search centred on the combination of psychological expertise, leadership capability and an understanding of high-performance environments.
We looked beyond job titles, assessing candidates against the real demands of the role: leading mental health and wellbeing provision, safeguarding, stakeholder engagement and the ability to influence culture across complex sporting environments. The search considered professionals from elite sport and other high-pressure settings, widening the pool while keeping a clear focus on people who understood the distinctive demands placed on professional footballers.
Then something happened that rarely does. As the search progressed, several of the senior people we approached told us the role wasn’t for them, and then, unprompted, recommended the same person: Yvie Ryan. Her work at Liverpool was well documented, and her peers spoke about her in the highest terms. When the people you’d want for a role start pointing you towards one candidate, it tells you something no CV can.
Yvie was assessed against the same framework as every other candidate, including the balance at the centre of the brief: the expertise to support individuals facing complex personal challenges, and the leadership capability to shape an established function operating across the professional game. She stood out on both.
Result
Yvie Ryan was appointed Director of Wellbeing.
An HCPC-registered Practitioner Psychologist, Yvie spent 12 seasons with Liverpool Football Club, five working with the first team and a further seven supporting Academy players from under-eight level through to the professional development phase. Before Liverpool, she worked across Olympic and Paralympic sport, including British Triathlon and Para Triathlon.
Her experience went beyond one-to-one player support. At Liverpool, her work included parent education and coach development, helping create environments that better understood the psychological and emotional needs of developing athletes. That breadth mattered to the PFA, which needed a leader able to understand both the immediate wellbeing needs of individual members and the wider environments, relationships and cultures that shape player welfare.
The appointment secured specialist leadership for one of the most significant areas of the PFA’s work and the leadership required to keep developing its wellbeing and safeguarding provision as the challenges facing professional footballers continue to change.