Soccer Actually Helping Those Who Need Help

Ok, ok, settle down, we've laughed enough about the Homeless World Cup. It's a preposterously stupid attempt to make people think that "soccer cares" and that soccer can cure the world of all its problems. "If everybody just played the footie like, there'd be no more bad stuff and the world would be well good, like." So silly.

But sometimes soccer can help. This is an amazing story of how Mauro Raffaelli, an Italian psychiatrist, has used soccer to successfully help schizophrenics in their struggle for normalcy. Here's a quote:

Sandro was a perfectly ordinary, rather handsome young Italian man. He was working as a bodyguard for the Italian president. But the stress of carrying a gun, and worrying about assassination attempts, catalysed a latent psychosis in Alessandro. Sandro says: "I like to think that my mum was my first medication. I guess football was my second. Football worked for me because it helped me escape the prison of madness... The weird thing is, the opposite team became the voices in my head, they embodied the voices, and that helped me. It made them real. And then I could cope."

A really nice story and continued success to the folks that do this.