Former Reading and Stoke City striker Dave Kitson has revealed himself as ‘The Secret Footballer’.
Kitson wrote five books under ‘The Secret Footballer’ pseudonym and had a weekly newspaper column with The Guardian in the course of the 2010s.
The 46-year-old, who also played for Cambridge, Sheffield United and Portsmouth, says he stopped writing newspaper columns following the death of former Leeds United, Newcastle United and Wales midfielder Gary Speed in 2011.
‘I’m The Secret Footballer. I’ve never said that out loud before. It was an concept that got here to me once I wasn’t completely satisfied with where football was going and I needed an outlet to precise it for my very own mental health,’ Kitson said in an interview with Champions Speakers.
‘I’ve been writing since I used to be a child. It’s a passion. As I said, I desired to be a travel author. The writing was cathartic. It helped me process what was happening in football, things that just didn’t make sense to me in any respect.
‘It began as something that wasn’t about naming names. It was about explaining what happens within the industry and why.
Get your football fix
Don’t need to miss the week’s biggest football stories? Metro’s exclusive football newsletter, In The Mixer, is your essential guide.
From the most recent transfer rumours and managerial moves to evaluation of the most important games and quite a bit more, our experts have you ever covered.
Join here, it’s an open goal.
‘I might write and leave people to form their very own opinions. It was fun for some time, then it bred huge anxiety. I had a profession and an enormous contract. If I’d been outed, I might have been sacked and ostracised. Now everyone has a podcast and an outlet. Back then, it was genuinely latest.
‘It modified football on this country and led to overhauls at the very best levels, which I’m happy with. However the stress and anxiety were immense.
‘The worst thing that happened was once I wrote a column about mental health called ‘Sometimes There’s Darkness Behind the Light’.
‘No person talked about mental health in football then. In the event you spoke about it, you were seen as weak. I said there was a mental health epidemic and I predicted it was only a matter of time before someone took their very own life.
‘I submitted it on Friday, it went out Saturday and on Sunday they found Gary Speed dead. That’s when the entire Secret Footballer idea and concept became not fun any more. It gave the column this credibility within the worst possible way and it was really difficult, and I suffered and struggled with guilt for a very long time that I hadn’t written that column earlier and that we may need prevented what happened from happening.
‘After which I just became so offended on the authorities for being really passive on the problem of mental health and never doing enough and never helping and I still feel anger towards them but fortunately the those that were in those positions are not any longer there and things have modified and things of things have gotten higher.
‘But that tragedy was just essentially the most horrendous thing that would ever occur I felt such sympathy for his family and it was so unnecessary and that was the day that ‘The Secret Footballer’ went from being a kind of a cult column to this thing that everyone was now going to as this as this kind of bible on football and like I say, it was credibility within the worst possible way, and I just not long after stopped and I just stopped and I disappeared and I ended writing.’
For more stories like this, check our sport page.
Follow Metro Sport for the most recent news on
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
MORE: Former Arsenal captain backed to grow to be Chelsea manager
MORE: Former Manchester United coach reveals Sir Alex Ferguson’s two transfer targets as an alternative of David de Gea
MORE: Rio Ferdinand says £45m star is ‘critical’ to Arsenal winning the Premier League