Prostate United Rotherham

Football clubs united in tackling prostate cancer 

Fans and players at South Yorkshire’s top football clubs have been giving prostate cancer a kick as they raise money to help highlight the signs and symptoms and save lives.

Prostate United was founded in 2018 at Rotherham United and now involves 60 professional and non-league clubs across the country, raising awareness of the cancer that affects one in eight men in the UK each year and claims around 12,000 lives.

Hundreds of staff and fans of Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Barnsley FC, Doncaster Rovers and Rotherham United join the common cause of supporting Prostate Cancer UK each year by taking on sponsored challenges including distance running, cycling and walking.

Several thousand of pounds are raised every year by the clubs who feature in a Prostate Cancer UK league table. Doncaster’s Rovers currently head the 2024 table followed closely by the Owls and the Blades, then Barnsley’s Tykes and Rotherham’s Millers.

Former RUFC Fitness coaches Ross Burbeary and Stephen Gilpin founded Prostate United which to date has raised more than £500,000 nationally to help fight the disease.

Ross told football fanzine FourFourTwo: “I was in the medical room with Steve, who wanted to do something to remember his grandad who had passed away from prostate cancer,” co-founder Burbeary tells FourFourTwo now. “It was coming up to October and we wondered if we could do something fitness-related – some kind of challenge.

“So we started talking around the cancer and how one man dies from it every 45 minutes. We asked ourselves, ‘What could we do in 45 minutes?’ We thought we could run 10k. Then again the next day, all October. So, in support of Prostate Cancer UK, we said we were going to raise funds by running 10k every day in under 45 minutes.”

Read the full FourFourTwo interview here

Learn more about the Prostate United story here: https://prostateunited.prostatecanceruk.org/about