It's taken fourteen years, but the Premier League just caught up

Last week the Premier League, the FA and Team GB stood alongside Prince William and Catherine to launch On Your Side - a mental health toolkit for sport, aimed squarely at male suicide, launched on World Suicide Prevention Day at Everton's Hill Dickinson Stadium.

Harry Kane, Alan Shearer, Dame Kelly Holmes all lending their names to it.

Headlines everywhere.

I read the news and thought: it's about time.

The letter

Four months after we lost my brother Lan, I sat down and wrote to every club in the Premier League. Not for money. Not for sponsorship. Just for help.

"I want to talk to you about my youngest brother of 26 years, Lan. He tragically took his own life 4 months ago after suffering from depression and I am writing to you as a Football Club because I think you can help,"

I didn't know back then exactly how a football club could help. I just knew, in my gut, that they had a part to play.

"Football plays such a pivotal part for young men today that you are ideally placed to help us talk about suicide prevention... I believe that whatever you can do, no matter how small, will get people talking about it,"

I wasn't asking for a partnership or a platform. I was asking clubs to notice something they were already sitting on — the trust of millions of men who would never talk to a doctor, but would talk to their team.

"We are not looking for funding or sponsorship, we are just a small group of family and friends that have been devastated by the loss of one of our own, trying to make a difference,"

Almost nobody replied. In 2012, suicide wasn't a word clubs wanted anywhere near their badge.

Where that letter ended up

I didn't know it at the time, but that letter was the first brick. It didn't get us a partnership with the Premier League - it got us a kickabout in Downhills Park with Lan's mates and a few borrowed gazebos.

But the idea in it never went away: football has a responsibility to its fans, and it's ideally placed to reach the people who need reaching most.

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Fourteen years later, that idea has become the Mental Health World Cup - tournaments at Watford, QPR, Everton, Millwall, over a million pounds raised, thousands of players who've stood on a pitch and talked about something they'd never have said in a waiting room.

And now it's Everton's own stadium hosting the Premier League's own mental health campaign, standing next to a memorial bench for Gary Speed, backed by the FA, the Royal Foundation, and some of the biggest names in the game.

Good things come to those who don't stop asking

I'm not precious about who gets there first. What matters is that they've got there. The Premier League putting its full weight behind a framework - get ready, open the conversation, ask, listen, support - is exactly what that letter was asking for in 2012, just with better funding and bigger stadiums than I had.

It's taken fourteen years. It took a lot of letters that went unanswered, a lot of tournaments run on favours and goodwill, and a family that refused to let this go quiet. But the message got through in the end.

If there's one thing I'd want anyone reading this to take from it: don't stop asking. You might not get the answer you want the first time, or the tenth. But the letter you write in the worst four months of your life might just be the one that, fourteen years on, you get to watch come true on the biggest stage in football.

Giancarlo