4 May 22, 2022The Sunday TimesFootball Premier League
perfectly natural but for his profes-
sion. The trope that footballers should
“shut up and play” is something he
finds “really bizarre”.
“I feel like it’s only an argument
that gets used against players by peo-
ple who feel threatened by us,” he
says. “Politicians have used it when
players are perhaps derailing or
undermining their policies or ideas.
When you have a bad game or bad
period of form, people say, ‘Oh if you
spent less time doing this you’d be
better at football’ — but I don’t know
any other industry where people are
told to ‘just stick to what your job is.’ ”
As a matter of fact, Mings is “more
interested in business than politics”.
He’s entrepreneurial, the co-owner of
an interior design company founded
with an old school friend, and
involved in developing an app
called SetPlay, which is aimed
at casual sports and esports
players, helping them to
find games to join or orga-
nise tournaments.
He also runs his own acad-
emy for grassroots players,
aged six to 16, in the Midlands
and South West, which is being
supported by Mitre, for whom he
was recently announced as
global ambassador. He’s at
Coton Green to launch the part-
nership, and his deep connec-
tions to non-League football
(his dad, Adie Mings, was a cele-
brated, bustling No 9 for Chip-
penham who went on to be their
manager) means the visit feels like
soul food. “I look back at my life
when I was playing for Chippen-
ham and Yate and think, Christ,T
yrone Mings sits with a bottle
of water, and a nostalgic
smile, in a club house on the
edge of Tamworth. A pot of
tea is brewing and this place
— the habitat of Midland
League Division Two’s Coton
Green FC — is homely and
lovingly kept.
Outside, the pitch is bumpy and the
corner flags lean at a permanent
angle, as if braced for the next blast of
wind. It takes Tyrone back. “Then?”
he grins. “My goal was to get into the
Conference. That was the height of
my ambition: going to play for
Hereford.”
We retread the humble roads he
traipsed before his arrival as an elite
performer — Aston Villa captain,
England centre half. There was his
start in the senior game at part-time
Yate Town, where team-mates came
to training covered in paint, driving
work vans, or straight from university,
and he still lived at home, fitting in
football between shifts in a pub.
There was Chippenham Town, his
next club, another Southern League
side. There, you actually got pasta or
baked potato and beans — at Yate,
player nutrition extended to burger
and chips after games. Mings still has a
photo of him celebrating at the end ofone match, thrusting four fingers
towards the camera: the team kept
four clean sheets in a row and the
manager had promised the lads a
tenner each if they did so.
We delve further, going back to his
year, as a child, of living in a homeless
shelter with his mum and three
sisters. It was during this period that
he won a place at Southampton’s
academy. “That gave me something to
focus on,” Mings, 29, says. “I think
hopes and dreams are what keep you
going at times. I had something to be
anchored by, whereas my sisters
didn’t, so things were more difficult
for them. Hope is massive and trying
to instil it in kids, through school or
sport, is the best thing we can do for
the next generation.”
Other elements shaped Mings.
There was his stint as a mortgage
adviser before joining his first profes-
sional club, Ipswich Town. There was
his scholarship at prestigious Millfield
School, which he earned at 16, and
was the start of his fightback after
Southampton released him. Mings’s
reminiscences are a reminder of how
diverse, how challenging and how cir-
cuitous footballers’ journeys can be:
how the gloss of the Premier League
paints over a thousand complex sto-
ries. Those who take players on get
burned if they are forgetful of the life
experiences with which they speak.
Mings brings the same articulacy
and authenticity as Marcus Rashford
to the causes he speaks on, and one of
his most robust pieces of defending
was against the home secretary, Priti
Patel, after she attacked England’s
players for taking a knee at last
summer’s European Championship,June 14, 2021
Asked whether
England fans, who
objected to the taking
a knee gesture, had a
right to boo their own
team, the home
secretary Priti Patel
said: “That’s a choice
for them, quite frankly.”July 12 After Patel
condemned the racist
abuse of England’s
black players,
following defeat in the
Euros final, Mings
tweeted: “You don’t
get to stoke the fire at
the beginning of the
tournament by
labelling our anti-
racism message as
‘Gesture Politics’ &
then pretend to be
disgusted when the
very thing we’re
campaigning against,
happens.”THE PATEL-
MINGS SPATaccusing them of “gesture politics”.
After Rashford, Bukayo Saka and
Jadon Sancho suffered racial abuse
following the Euros final, and Patel
joined a number of politicians in
tweeting support for the targeted
players, Mings took to Twitter himself
and called Patel out for having
“stoke[d] the fire”. More than half a
million people liked his post, with
even a former Conservative minister
speaking out in support.
“Quite overwhelming, the reac-
tion,” Mings recalls. “I don’t hold the
home secretary and her views in as
high a regard as, I guess, many
others do. It became bigger news
than it actually was — I just thought I
was standing up for the views of
many people, including my
team-mates, at a period that
was really crucial for us.
“I got asked about [Patel]
in the tournament and gave
quite a bland answer that
papered over the cracks.
Then when the tournament
finished, it was the right time to
say, ‘Listen, we’ve been doing
what we’ve been doing without
any support from the govern-
ment — now isn’t the time you
get to wade in, put your
England shirt on and get some
applause off the back of it. Peo-
ple now speak to me more
about that tweet than anything
I’ve done on the pitch, but for
me it wasn’t that big a deal.”
As a rounded, educated and
measured individual, Mings
wants to engage with the world
and contribute his views, and this
would be received as somethingTHE FOOTBALL
INTERVIEW
WITH JONATHAN NORTHCROFT
Aston Villa’s Tyrone Mings on his non-League
roots, Qatar and taking on the home secretary
‘Politicians tell us to
when they feel
threatened’
stick to our jobs