Dele Alli smiles, his features soften and there is a nervous little laugh. He does this a lot. It is one of his defence mechanisms, a way of pushing back at all the hurt. He knows that now.
Gary Neville is interviewing him for The Overlap and has just asked about his childhood. “I think there were a few incidents that can give you a kind of brief understanding,” Dele says, and there is a pause, an internal struggle – of the type he has wrestled with throughout his life. And then Dele kicks open the window to his soul.
“So, at six, I was molested by my mum’s friend, who was at the house a lot … so my mum was an alcoholic, and then …”
The lump in Dele’s throat has tightened, his voice cracks. He bows his head and fights back the tears. So does Neville. “Sorry,” Dele says. Why do the victims always say that?
Dele goes on to talk about how he was sent to live with his absentee father in Africa for a year to “learn discipline”, although he was returned after six months. “Horrible,” he says. “I didn’t want to be there at all.”
Growing up was impossibly tough for Dele on his estate in Milton Keynes. His mother had no money and there were no boundaries, no rules. Dele had a house key and he came and went as he pleased. He was smoking at seven, running drugs on his push-bike at eight. At 11 he was, in his words, “hung off a bridge by a guy from the next estate, a man”.
Dele tells Neville that “there were always 10 guys around the house … it was definitely the drugs part”. He was regularly in trouble with the police and it was only when he was adopted at 12 by the parents of his best friend, Harry Hickford, that he felt some stability. Even then, and despite how heaven-sent the Hickfords were, Dele struggled to open up to them. He was worried that they might have got rid of him.
Dele has long been a closed book, not allowing people in, believing that to do so would mean getting hurt. Until now. Until he took the decision to sit down with Neville. And now we know. We can understand him and his troubles more clearly.
If a million people woke up on Thursday with opinions about Dele’s on-field slump, which has broadly followed the 2018 World Cup when he was a part of the England team that reached the semi-finals, then how many of them have been radically altered?
Dele has not been himself for a number of years and it has been possible to feel that he was no longer able to make the sacrifices needed to remain at the top level. It was also easy to link that to the impression he was drinking and partying too much.
Which is not to say that these sentences read poorly and are untrue. Just that there is another, previously untold dimension – Dele’s mental health nightmare, which has its roots in childhood trauma.
It is an uncomfortable moment in the Neville interview when Dele says he would rather have waited a little longer before being so candid; he only finished a six-week stint in a US mental health rehabilitation facility in the middle of June, where he came to terms with, among many other things, his addiction to sleeping pills. He was taking them not to sleep but to “escape from reality”.
Dele says his team had received calls about where he was from the media. They knew and it was possibly only a matter of time before they ran the story. Consequently, he felt he had to act, to own the narrative. Yet how he does so.
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Dele has always been synonymous with bravery, certainly on his way up from MK Dons to Tottenham and the summit of the game; how he would risk the ball and try all his moves – no matter how outrageous. This is him upping the ante significantly because, to repeat, he is not a person that shares easily.
It is a problem in football, where the pressure to perform is matched by that to conform to particular ideals of behaviour; show no weakness being one. What stands out in Dele’s account is how unforgiving and isolating the professional game can be, how the dream can unravel, the size of the gap between perception and reality.
Imagine wanting to retire at 24. Dele did, after being dropped by José Mourinho at Spurs, although he stresses that he does not want to blame his former manager for his troubles. He does say it was tough for him when Mauricio Pochettino left Tottenham in 2019 – “Mauricio cared about me as a person before the football, which is what I needed” – but none of this is anyone’s fault, rather the outcome of a specific set of circumstances.
Dele eventually realised he needed help when he was told that he had to undergo hip surgery in mid-April, ending his loan at Besiktas from Everton; he could feel the grip of darkness, the start of a familiar cycle and he simply could not bear it any longer.
Dele knows that he cannot bottle it all up any more and he wants to show it is OK not to be OK, to help himself and hopefully others who feel trapped.
It is unclear whether Dele’s future lies at Everton, where he is contracted for another 12 months; they would have to pay Spurs £10m if he made a further seven appearances for them. But no matter what, Everton have shown their class by supporting him in his rehabilitation, for which he is enormously grateful.
Dele says he feels rejuvenated, that he has the same passion and determination to prove himself as he had when he arrived at Spurs in 2015. It is lovely to hear and so are the messages of goodwill from all over the game. Dele has always been easy to love but never more so than now.
The NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331.
