One Premier League CEO's bid to save England's ‘lost boys' from ‘toxic online ideas'

New York Times

2 days ago

Paul Barber is the chief executive of Brighton & Hove Albion, a Premier League club whose accounts show a profit of nearly £200million over the past two seasons.
It's not all about money, of course, but things are very healthy: Barber has been at the club since 2012 after previously working for the Vancouver Whitecaps, Tottenham Hotspur and the Football Association and, in April last year, Brighton's owner Tony Bloom tied him down for a further six years with a contract until 2030.
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In his childhood years, however, Barber says things threatened to spiral after his parents split up when he was 13.
'I went from being a kid in the top quarter of the class to being disengaged, disinterested, not turning up for lessons, playing truant, getting into scraps (fights), and losing my sense of direction and purpose,' he tells The Athletic. 'That was partly because my dad left home and I didn't have that real male role model in my life any more.
'My mum was working three jobs to make sure there was food on the table and clothes on the backs of myself, my younger brother, and sister. I shut myself off from pretty much everyone and everything. It was such a short period from being a kid who was well balanced and engaged in every sport to being completely disengaged from everything and everyone.'
It is this experience that led Barber, in his role as non-executive chair of the charity Football Beyond Borders, to spearhead a new group, the 'Lost Boys Taskforce'. It wants the UK government to help 'save a generation of boys from toxic online ideas by providing trusted adults'.
It follows the national discussion that gripped the UK in 2024 when Netflix released Adolescence, a four-part drama delving into the 'manosphere', and followed a family whose lives are torn apart when a 13-year-old schoolboy is arrested for killing a female classmate. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer met the creators of the show and young people to take in their views on how young men can be supported.
Barber, in a press release, warned: 'At a time when toxic influencers like Andrew Tate are filling the void for so many boys, it's clear that too many young men feel isolated and directionless. That's a ticking time-bomb, not just for them, but for generations that follow.'
The search for direction is taking young men to dark corners of the internet — in 2023, for example, the third-most Googled person in the world was Tate, a self-proclaimed sexist who has described women as 'intrinsically lazy' and said there was 'no such thing as an independent female'.
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The taskforce features representation from politics, business, sport and education — including English Football Association CEO Mark Bullingham, England men's national football team assistant manager Anthony Barry, actor and documentary-maker Ross Kemp, Iron Man triathlete John McAvoy and England basketball player Kofi Josephs — and is asking the government to fund training for 10,000 'trusted adults' in education and sport settings.
The group says 630,000 young people in England do not have a 'trusted adult', by which it means a person outside their family who they feel safe to confide in.
As Barber puts it: 'There's a need for such people that sit alongside parents… they need to be able to listen without making a judgement, to understand what's going on in that young person's life.
'The most important thing with a trusted adult is being there consistently and when you are there, being present. Unless you listen, unless you understand, unless you relate to that challenge that they're facing, you can't help them.'
Dr Alex Blower, author of the book Lost Boys: How Education is Failing Young Working-Class Men, has also founded Boys' Impact, a network seeking to address the gap in education outcomes for young men. He says there was a noticeable spike in concerning conversations and incidents following the pandemic, which took children out of schools, increasing online dependency and limiting social interactions.
This year, the Centre for Social Justice published a report entitled Lost Boys: State of the Nation. Citing the UK Office for National Statistics, it said 15.1 per cent of men aged 16-24 between July and September 2024 were not in education, employment or training. This represented 550,000 individuals, an increase of 150,000 since before Covid-19. The report also described Britain as 'suffering a pandemic of fatherlessness', saying that 2.5 million children — one in five of all dependent children — had no father figure in the home.
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In Barber's case, matters never became so extreme. His life was placed back on track as a teenager, but it took an intervention by a teacher and a football coach. 'Those guys spotted this change, they realised something was up,' he says. 'I hadn't told anyone my parents had split. No one knew. No one understood. But these teachers knew me well enough to say: 'Hang on. Something happened there. We need to get to the bottom of it'. Rather than punish me, they said: 'Let's understand what the hell is going on?'.
'I was one example back in 1980, because now there are 630,000 versions of me, and rather than playing truant and maybe getting into one or two scraps, some of these kids are in gangs, they're carrying knives, they're getting murdered, they're committing murder.'
While generalisations can be dangerous, trends are visible.
That Centre for Social Justice report also detailed that 76 per cent of children in custody, for example, said they had an absent father. In Britain, one in four boys aged 10 to 11 is obese, while teenage boys are grappling with body-image concerns. The impact of online harm is also laid out: the average age at which a child first sees online porn is 13, while one in 10 see it as young as nine years old. A National Centre for Gaming Disorders was established in 2020, and 90 per cent of its users in 2023 were male.
Dr Blower explains that young people are reeled into the 'manosphere' by browsing for subject areas that may ordinarily be deemed positive, such as wellness, fitness, motivation, sports or gaming. Bad actors, he explains, 'use positive things as a hook to begin to engage young individuals in content aligned with misogynistic views'.
He makes the point that sport can offer young people a focus, and trusted adults from within sport can often be more relatable than a teacher. Yet it also seems justified to ask whether men's professional sport is doing everything it can to address attitudes towards women and perceptions of masculinity. Last month, for example, former Mexico striker Javier Hernandez apologised after releasing a video online which claimed 'women are failing' and 'eradicating masculinity'.
While Barber cannot be expected to answer for the global game, he can speak more generally on football's approach towards creating more mindful men.
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'It's a really fair point,' he says. 'Clubs in the Premier League and the Championship are increasingly recognising they have a role to play in education.
'We (Brighton) bring in outside organisations to help educate players, for example, on how to conduct themselves in a situation in a nightclub where there's an attractive girl that they are talking to; how do you conduct yourself, what's appropriate, what's not appropriate? The trouble is, unless you've been told or educated by your parents or an elder sibling, then you don't know what you don't know.
'For a long time, there's been this assumption that every young person who goes out into the adult world knows how to behave. It's a naive assumption, because there are a lot of things you have to learn about being an adult. We have to bridge the gap.
'A lot of Premier League clubs, ours included, spend more money on player-care departments. We need to help young men and women develop as humans and provide them with life skills. We definitely haven't got all the answers. We haven't got everything right. We understand we've got a role to play.'
A UK government spokesperson told The Athletic the state is investing £88million ($119m) 'in opportunities for boys in a major expansion of youth services and real-world opportunities to reconnect young people with the world around them'.
Barber says the task force is seeking £5million in funding over a three-year period to train 10,000 trusted adults, which could come from a combination of private and public money. It also requires support from the Department of Education so that trained personnel, who will be subject to safeguarding checks, can access the system and support children.
'This isn't something where the government is going to flip a switch and everything's going to change,' says Barber, 'but someone has to start something if we're going to see change.
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'If you go back to Adolescence, which was a drama, you look at a stable family; husband and wife, a sister, a young lad. They think they have a good kid doing well at school and sociable at home, but they did not realise he was lurking in dark corners on the internet.
'It could be anyone's 13- or 14-year-old who goes down that path. A trusted adult may be able to stop it.'
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