John Mousinho has had a 16-year career in the lower leagues and that gives him a particular perspective on those who play his sport. “Despite what a lot of people might think about football and footballers, the majority of them are really vulnerable,” he says.
“It’s a very difficult industry to be involved in. It’s a very tough and harsh industry and one you can be spat out of at a very young age, or an old age, and just left on your own.”
Mousinho was named the new chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association this month. The Oxford United club captain believes it is his job to change perceptions and not just about the players who elected him to the role.
Technically, the 35-year-old is chair of the players’ board, a new body set up as part of a wide reorganisation of the union. Change came only after external criticism and the whiff of scandal had dogged the PFA for years. There is now an attempt to draw a line and start again, however, and Mousinho, in his role as “the ultimate representative of the voice of all of the players”, will be at the forefront of that.
Where does the PFA go from here? Perhaps surprisingly, Mousinho says the first task is to reconnect with its members. From the outside the PFA can seem one of the most influential groups of organised labour left in the UK: well-financed and effective. During the past year it has protected its members’ wages from cuts caused by the pandemic and overturned an EFL salary cap in the courts. But Mousinho says that internally the picture is different, with a membership (standing at 5,000 players) distant from the organisation and sceptical of its purpose.
“There are far too many people, rightly or wrongly, who don’t use the PFA to its full use, don’t necessarily know what it does,” he says. “You go into the dressing room and players say: ‘They don’t do anything for us.’ There is this negative perception out there and we need to re-engage.”
With the PFA membership made up of “international captains to players that have forged a career through the non-leagues”, Mousinho says interests diverge. “There’s no point in us going to Premier League players and telling them about the benefits of a £6,000 pension contribution every year, but to a League Two player that’s very different,” he says.
“We’ve also got WSL players who look at us and say: ‘We need the PFA to help us develop the women’s game.’ That’s a structural involvement we don’t have in the men’s game.”
Mousinho says there are five or six topics that do unify the membership, with anti-discrimination at the forefront. It is an area where players have taken the lead over the past year, often pushing for action not only before governing bodies and competitions but the union as well.
There remains, however, a lack of substantial change in representation at senior levels or over social media abuse. With a third of the PFA’s members of black and minority ethnicity, Mousinho believes discrimination is another area in which they are sceptical.
“One of the messages coming from members in terms of tackling discrimination is that it’s great to have these initiatives, that taking the knee is brilliant for raising awareness, as is the social media boycott. But the next step is the change,” he says.
“There’s clearly a lot of work to be done in football so that there is representation of minorities at board level, at managerial level and executive level.”
Mousinho says the PFA intends to use its leverage to push professional clubs into adopting the FA’s Leadership Diversity Code. Currently, 51 of the 97 league clubs in the men’s and women’s game have agreed to its principles of expanding representation.
“We want to take on the FA’s diversity code so that essentially every club in the EFL signs up to it and we want to work with the FA on that,” Mousinho says. “Then we won’t just see awareness of discrimination, we will see actual change.”
On the issue of dementia and neurodegenerative disease, for which the PFA has been criticised for a reactive and reluctant approach, Mousinho says players also have a common interest. “There’s far too much of an assumption that it’s not a problem for current footballers as well. It simply is,” he says. He wants the union to be more active on the issue and for critics such as the campaigner Dawn Astle to “keep peppering us”. “We need the criticism, we need the feedback,” he says.
Mousinho’s role begins this summer, when new chief executive Maheta Molango starts in the job. Mousinho believes the appointment of the 38-year-old CEO, who has been a lawyer and a club executive as well as a striker for Wrexham, is a sign of the PFA delivering change. He also says that publishing the independent review into the PFA’s governance, which has not been seen by the public, would “show how far we’ve come”.
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The union can change, Mousinho says, but he also believes it can drive change within the game, because of the influence of its members. “As players we should live up to being role models and realise that it’s very easy for a player to be influential,” he says.
“As a union, we need to be the leading light. We need to say to our players we are going to use that power … and be very vocal with it. Players are wise to superficial changes, they want to see real change within the game. Essentially that’s the real priority: for the union to grasp that opportunity.”
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