Do we like them?

Do we like Jonny Wilkinson?

Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent on the record, with years of charity and mental health work; the score stops short of higher because the public record on his wider views is thin.

Jonny Wilkinson is England rugby royalty, and the thing that makes him interesting is what he's said about the pressure of it. In a 2019 Irish Times interview he said he spent his career surviving the pressure he put on himself, and that more caps, titles and points never fixed it. That's a fairly raw thing to say for a bloke who was the poster boy for winning.

He was open about it at a time when it wasn't the done thing for sporting heroes. A COVER magazine feature the same month quotes him asking, “Who am I?” once the rugby stopped defining him. He then launched a mental health campaign with the insurer Vitality, saying publicly that mental health affects everyone.

On the good-person side there's nothing nasty on the record that we could find: no court outcome, no accusations from colleagues, no lawsuit. A 2020 Mail on Sunday report about a French tax dispute is tabloid territory and we couldn't find how it ended, so it doesn't count either way. What we did find is self-blame rather than finger-pointing, such as owning a poor kicking display rather than blaming the ball.

The good stuff goes back years. In 2004 he donated his World Cup shirt to a prize draw aiming to raise £1 million, with the proceeds split between five charities, nearly half going to the NSPCC. COVER later reported he'd set up his own foundation to tackle prejudice and promote understanding.

Nothing new has blown up lately. The latest we found is a pundit's comment in February 2026, when he said England had the talent but opponents were starting to see them as susceptible after the loss to Ireland. That's just rugby chat, not a scandal.

So would we support him? Yes. The record is short on drama and long on being a decent human who talked about his own mental health so others could. The gap is that he doesn't say much about the issues we care about, so we can't call him a champion for them, only a clean pass.