“Dad was my absolute hero,” Ella Toone said. “He is the reason why I am a Lioness.” The England and Manchester United footballer, 26, has become an ambassador for Prostate Cancer UK, two years after her father Nick died of the disease at 59.
Nick Toone died three days short of his 60th birthday. He had been diagnosed the day after he watched his daughter score in the Euro 2022 final, the match England won 2-1 against Germany at Wembley. Toone won the European championships with England in 2022 and 2025.
The charity announced her on Friday, ahead of Father’s Day, along with Red Roses rugby player Alex Matthews. Alex’s father Dave was first diagnosed more than 10 years ago. The family thought he was clear, but the cancer returned in 2023 and this time it cannot be cured. He is still in treatment. “When he was well enough to watch me captain the Red Roses last year, it meant everything to me,” Matthews said.
What Toone said
“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him and mourn what my family has lost,” Toone said. She pointed to the scale of the disease. Prostate cancer is now the most common cancer in the UK, and in the next 10 years almost three quarters of a million men will be living with it or its impact. “These men aren’t just numbers,” she said. “They’re dads just like mine.”
She described the charity as the UK’s biggest public funder of prostate cancer research. Its work on diagnosis and treatment, she said, should make screening a reality and give men more treatment options with fewer side effects, “so men like my dad can be diagnosed early enough to be treated and can spend more time with the people they love.”
The charity’s figures show one in eight men will get prostate cancer, and one man dies of it every 45 minutes. Too many men, it says, are diagnosed late, when the cancer has already spread and is harder to treat.
Silence and shock
Toone has spoken before about how little she knew. Writing for the Players’ Tribune last year, she said her father’s death was a shock even to people close to him, because hardly anyone knew he was ill. “People ask me now, ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’, and I’m like, I didn’t know either,” she wrote. “I didn’t know half of it… it’s still raw.”
Chiara De Biase, the charity’s fundraising and strategy director, said the pair’s “passion, profile and competitive spirit” would help spread the message that “knowing your risk can save your life.”
Toone and Matthews will appear on the Piccadilly Lights in London on Sunday, June 21, at 12pm and 6.30pm, in an on-screen tribute to “epic dads.” Men can check their risk online in 30 seconds at prostatecanceruk.org/risk-check.
Sources
- Ella Toone MBE and Alex Matthews join as our newest charity ambassadors
- Ella Toone becomes Prostate Cancer UK ambassador after losing ‘hero’ father
