Oxford United and Wales international Will Vaulks has been named as the winner of the FIFPRO player voice award.
Vaulks, 32, was presented with the award at a ceremony in Lisbon, in recognition for his work in suicide prevention and raising awareness around mental health in football.
“It feels incredible to be recognised at a global level,” Vaulks told The Athletic. “It’s a real honour and something that I don’t take lightly. It gives me an even louder voice, so that’s my main delight with winning it.”
It is a cause close to Vaulks’ heart, as both his grandfathers, Tom, 67, and Hywel, 78, died by suicide when he was a teenager.
Will Vaulks has been awarded the 2025 FIFPRO Merit Award for Player Voice 🏆
The Oxford United midfielder does exceptional work addressing suicide prevention and mental health awareness.#MeritAwards | #FIFPROGA25 pic.twitter.com/4HasV12Xrq
— FIFPRO (@FIFPRO) November 18, 2025
“My granddad Tom was a real Jack the lad, he had a Kawasaki 500 motorbike, he was fun, he was single, he would let us stay up late when my Mum and Dad weren’t looking after us,” Vaulks remembered. “He had a phrase, ‘when the cat’s away, the mice will play’, which I’ll never forget, and that was when the parents were away, we could stay up a bit later, we could wrestle, we could mess about.
“So, as a granddad, you can’t ask for much more as a kid growing up. But clearly he really struggled with his mental health and he took his own life in 2007. You look for all these answers and with suicide you don’t get the answers sometimes. So that was obviously really hard.”
Just 18 months later, there was further heartbreak in the Vaulks household when his grandfather on his mother’s side, the Welsh side of his family, Hywel, also took his own life.
“He was quiet, calm, loving. He and my grandmother, Brenda, only lived 20 minutes from us, so we were around their house all the time,” Vaulks recalled. “He was gentle and real good fun as well as a granddad.
“He came to watch me play on the Sunday (before his death). He stood at the side of the post. It’s one of the images that you probably wouldn’t have remembered at the time if nothing had happened the next day, but because of what happened, I’ll never forget it. He told my Mum he loved her that night which was slightly out of character and then he disappeared in the morning and took his own life with no warning.
“We don’t have an answer, we don’t look for that answer anymore, you do for a long time. But you don’t take your own life if you’re not in a really low mental health.”
Vaulks is a seven-time Wales international (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Vaulks spoke about the devastating impact that had on his family.
“There was zero support for a 13-year-old who lost his granddad and zero support for a 14-year-old a year later who lost his granddad, there was nothing,” he said.
“My grandmother (Brenda) pretty much completely lost who she was, all because of the trauma of losing her husband to suicide. She died in a home in the end. I got home from school one day and my mum had rang an ambulance for herself because she was so anxious, and was having panic attacks.
“That’s, again, all because she lost her dad and was the one who found him.
“You don’t just brush down and go again the next day when someone dies to suicide. It’s like a bomb goes off in your family and the tremors, like an earthquake, go on forever.
“I was lucky to have an amazing support system and a strong family that stuck together and we’ve spoken about it over the years.”
That explains why Vaulks is so passionate about championing suicide prevention and mental health awareness causes.
“My main thing is I obviously don’t want people to suffer and take their lives,” he explained. “But I know the devastation that’s left behind and I don’t want families to go through what my family’s been through and you still go through it, forever, with a suicide.”
Vaulks is an ambassador for the Baton of Hope charity, set up by journalist Mike McCarthy, who lost his 31-year-old son, Ross, to suicide. Their aim is to provide awareness around mental health, and bring people together whose lives have been impacted by suicide.
One of their key initiatives is the Workplace Pledge, which urges all companies to commit to prioritising mental health in the workplace, with measures such as suicide-awareness training for all staff. Vaulks’ club, Oxford United, became the first in the country to sign up.
Oxford’s players also sat through suicide awareness talks with members from the Baton of Hope team.
“The difference in the dressing room was just unbelievable,” Vaulks said. “I had lads coming up to me, telling me about their own experiences, their own family’s experiences. And that is the reason we do it, to get that peer-to-peer support to stop people getting to the end result, which is suicide. We’re now looking toward the wider football community, and we’re having some really exciting conversations with the PFA and the EFL.”
At Oxford, Vaulks was then involved in the club’s impactful ‘Can We Talk’ campaign, that was the brainchild of Ryan Maher, their head of communications. That brought Vaulks together with the brother of Joey Beauchamp, one of the club’s greatest ever players, who died by suicide, and the mother of 24-year-old fan Jack Badger, who also took his own life.
“We were all really vulnerable and emotional that day,” Vaulks said. “It’s about trying to reach as many people as possible, so you need those videos that touch people.
“But we have to then have action after that. We can’t just do these videos and say ‘let’s talk more’ and leave it. That’s not enough. We have to talk, yes, but we need change and change comes from things like the Workplace Pledge. That’s because everywhere I go, there’s someone who’s been affected by suicide.
“To win awards like this, they do motivate you, and make you think ‘what I’m doing must be impacting people’.
“That really does reaffirm what you’re doing.”
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