Brentford psychologist Michael Caulfield and his bench

Football Daily

BBC

Soccer, Sports, News, Sports News, Sport

4.3 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 October 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Steve Crossman sits down with Brentford’s Fabio Carvalho and club psychologist Michael Caulfield to discuss how the club’s culture of talking openly has helped their players. Michael installed a bench at the training ground, dubbed Michael’s bench, where players can discuss what is on their mind and share. It has been such a success that the club have installed three more benches at the training ground for their Academy teams and are now putting up more benches around the local community, encourage people to talk to help with their mental health. In an honest interview, Fabio discusses the difficulties he faced as a young man moving from Portugal, how faith and removing himself from social media has helped him and how he thinks modern footballers could benefit from having deeper conversations and sharing their struggles.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts.
0:06.1	Can I just say?
0:07.6	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast.
0:10.0	It's such a wonderful listen.
0:11.7	So nice.
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0:14.8	Different paces, different heights, the roof is buckling.
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0:20.2	It's right foot goes for goal.
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0:22.7	And then enjoy even more podcasts full of analysis and reaction to the big stories.
0:27.7	The stat that is astonishing is they ended with the lowest amount of possession.
0:31.2	And she's had to live with that.
0:32.8	So if you love sport, a passion, it's almost like a religion.
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0:37.8	Sort of expecting that every week now.
0:41.4	This is the Football Daily podcast with Steve Crossman.
0:48.8	Welcome to the Football Daily podcast and welcome to a park in the centre of Brentford mostly like any
0:58.4	other park right now I'm standing in front of one of those sort of pens it's blue and red
1:04.0	metal there's a big football goal net built into it at either end and two basketball hoops
1:10.3	covered in graffiti, no nets.
1:13.5	Everything here has that feeling of it was built quite a long time ago.
	...

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