EPL TALK: Dele Alli’s mental health struggles are a lesson to us all

DELE Alli didn’t fail football. Football failed him. The sport has often struggled to live up to its responsibilities of care and empathy. Instead, it does snarky and snidely really, really well. In Dele’s case, it pulled out a poison pen for years when it should’ve been putting an arm across his shoulder.

Not the Harry Redknapp kind of arm across the shoulder, the blokey artificial gesture of affection in a man’s world, played by men, managed by men and often supported and analysed by men who can’t quite shake off a sense of the Churchillian, Dunkirk spirit.

Given the chance, they’d fight them all on the beaches, showing Roy Keane's spirit and desire to remind us, as Graeme Souness so often does, that football is still a man’s game. According to the Four Seasons, big girls don’t cry. According to any outraged pundit, big boys don’t cry either, especially those on even bigger salaries.

But Dele did cry, on camera, so heartbreakingly and honestly that he made Gary Neville cry too, and made the audience re-evaluate what real courage looks like. Being angry in a TV studio for viral clips isn’t particularly courageous. Dele revealed his long-term bravery by spending much of his life not talking about what makes him so brave. His life. His trauma. His survival.

He endured the toughest of childhoods on a neglected housing estate, where there was no family support, guidance or boundaries. He was sexually abused at six, selling drugs at eight and written off before puberty. There was more chance of prison than a professional career. His fortunes only improved when he was adopted by a loving family. Dele made his debut for MK Dons at 16, joined Tottenham at 19 and was the Professional Footballers’ Association Young Player of the Year by the time he was 20 (winning the award in 2016 and then retaining it in 2017.)

How was any of the above remotely possible? How can a single, wordy paragraph, truncated into a rushed potted history, do justice to a footballer who escaped an abusive upbringing and reached a World Cup semi-final with England in just over a decade? Hasn't he achieved enough?

Of course not. He sold us short, didn’t he? Dele didn’t satisfy our demands. Not his demands, you understand, or those of his loved ones, but those imposed upon him by strangers. His talent made him a conduit for our dreams. That’s the deal with all of them.

If we possessed Carlos Alvaraz’s shot-making capabilities, we’d all be defeating Novak Djokovic in a Wimbledon final. Obviously. And if we had Dele’s impudent knack of seeing angles and spaces between the lines, we’d be feeding forwards like Harry Kane, just like he did.

But he stopped, didn’t he? He lost his favourite Spurs manager, Mauricio Pochettino, in 2019 and lost his way. Jose Mourinho was caught on camera in a documentary telling his wayward playmaker not to look back on a Tottenham career with regrets. At Everton, Frank Lampard spoke of a lack of “focus”. And a loan move to Besiktas was written up like a career obituary in the jingoistic British media. What a waste of a dream that we were all living, vicariously, through a young English talent. He betrayed us all.

Reminding all what a real man is

Ordinarily, we like footballers who fulfil our obligations whilst still maintaining the pretence of being one of us. When Jack Grealish treats a Treble triumph with Manchester City like a promotion in a drab office job, we’re practically standing at his side like demented work colleagues, goading him into downing another vodka. Strip away the otherworldly talent, the fame and the bank account and we’re essentially the same, getting drunk on any success that comes our way.

And then, when Grealish suffers a dip in form, he’ll pay the price for such awful hedonism. We’ll turn on him quicker than he ever turned a full-back. That’s the deal: utterly one-sided and staggeringly hypocritical. The relationship is played out on our terms, just as it was with Dele. When he seemingly fell out of love with the world of football, the football world fell out of love with him. When he started to plateau rather than peak, his apparent lack of hunger disgusted those who believed he was squandering his God-given gifts.

And the suggestion of an early retirement was downright blasphemous. The 27-year-old wasn’t keeping up his end of the bargain, was he? Not like we would. We’d all be like Mike, hanging around for one last dance with the Chicago Bulls, defying age and the conventional limits of one’s physicality. We’d have Cristiano Ronaldo’s abs, Djokovic’s staying power and the relentless persistence of the T-1000. We’d keep coming back. Greatness is always the eternal target. Mental weakness is for the other guy.

Yeah, right.

Maybe - and this is just a theory - the rush to judge and dismiss Dele and other elite athletes who acknowledge their mental health struggles is an exercise in denial on our part. It’s the old JFK and Nixon line. When we see the GOATs, we see what we want to be. When we see Dele, we see what we probably are: fragile and vulnerable.

And who wants to see that? No, it’s much easier to be scornful, especially when these human frailties are coming from such a captivating entertainer. Dele’s day job is supposed to transport us away from our insecurities, rather than be reminded of them. So spare us the tears of a clown routine with Neville, eh?

But it’s not a routine. It’s a difficult and uncomfortable reality. A rich broken man is still a broken man. In this regard, Dele has bravely fulfilled his side of the bargain. He went public to declare that he really is one of us. He’s flawed, too. He’s completed a six-week stint in a mental health rehabilitation facility and is keen on resuming his career with Everton. He deserves another shot, but only if he wants it; a swansong on his terms.

Dele doesn’t owe us anything. He’s done enough in reminding a man’s game what a real man looks like.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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