I figured he was going through some major stuff, but actually the reality is deeper than most care to even consider. I genuinely hope he finds a way back to his best and beyond. He has nothing but my utmost respect for facing his challenges and finding a way to carve out some kind of success from his difficult beginnings.
I knew he had a bit of a troubled childhood, but I didn't realise the extent of how bad what he went through was until this interview came out. Just goes to show you that sometimes people forget these guys are humans too - like us 'normal' people, they have their own traumas, insecurities, fears, problems and difficulties. Being good at football doesn't erase that fact. Maybe football is an escape for a lot of them, but it doesn't mean they've come to terms with their past. In fact, in a lot of cases, suppressing it (which a lot of footballers who struggle with mental health do) can often aggravate the issue further. We never know what people are going through. I will admit I thought Dele had gone off the boil because he'd made his money, thought he'd already been given superstar status and his arrogance transcended his ability. That he was an overly pampered primma donna. In retrospect, I feel horrible for thinking this way now. He's clearly been struggling for a long time and it appears like all these traumatic experiences caught up with him. He couldn't hold it in any longer. Massive, massive respect to him for coming out and speaking publicly about this. Having the courage to be as vulnerable as this and reliving horrible moments from your past (and admitting you're still dealing with them) is something that should always be respected. I sincerely hope he gets all the help he needs to get through this. And I also hope he remembers that he doesn't have to go through this alone. Best of luck in your recovery, Dele. I wish you the best.
I said at the time Poch leaving and Mourinho arriving did Dele no favours, the difference in man management styles between the two likely contributed to Dele`s problems, Dele kind of confirms that when he says Poch was brilliant for him and it hit him hard when he left. Mourinho did not come across as a manager who would be good at helping a player deal with these kind of issues. Hopefully Dele rediscovers his form, it would be good to see him back to his best, he is a superb talent.
I hope Dele can find happiness, would love to see him recapture that form and promise he showed under Poch. From a club perspective, it shows just how important Poch was. Hopefully, we can get back to that family feel under Big Ange.
TBH I'd long assumed a large part of his dropoff was down to him getting rushed back from injury time and again and that finally catching up to him
I thought Mourinho came across in relatively good light actually. The fact he apologised to Dele before he knew the whole training and lazy/reaching potential talk would go viral thanks to Amazon surprised me as a pretty humble and considerate thing to do. I think the reality is that Dele has been carrying heavy baggage for his whole life and joined Spurs at exactly the right time to enable football itself to mask his deeper problems. Successful young team in which he was a star under a father figure manager was the perfect blend to help him escape. But he says himself - he was never confronting the real core of the issue and as soon as that delicate equilibrium started to tip, things started surfacing again. The delicate balance began to tip as that 2017 team started to decline and we failed to invest in it. We no longer had the overall quality to carry poor performances and Jose was perfectly justified to drop Dele when he did. By Dele's own admission, hardly anyone had a clue what he was going through and I doubt he would have known that dropping him would lead to him coming off the rails entirely as he lost his main escape - football. It may go some way to explain why Poch insisted on playing him even when he was hopelessly off form. He probably realised that not playing him would destroy him, and perhaps acted as father figure first, football manager second. In fact come to think of it, I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing was going on with Danny Rose who he also played despite overwhelming evidence that he was completely broken as a player. In hindsight, the Amazon "documentary" (if it can be called that with a straight face) came at the worst possible time for the players. With all the heavy air after the CL defeat, then managerial change, then barely a few months later Covid and lockdown...to have that documented and broadcast to the world couldn't have been easy.
Poch was important but as I've said in my longer post, perhaps he was too important in the sense that some players (Dele and Rose immediately spring to mind) were too close to him as an almost father-son relationship rather than a professional coach-player one, and that led to A) His judgement on them being clouded, and B) The impact of his departure having more of an effect than it needed to. From what I've read, Ange keeps very distant from players individually, rarely speaking to them at all. His team talks and group discussions are renowned for being very open, perhaps inspirational spaces, but he purposefully maintains a professional distance from the individual. I've read players from the Oz national team say that if you were called in to his office, you knew you were in serious trouble - such was the rarity of one-to-one meetings. So he sounds like the polar opposite of Poch in that regard but also doesn't have the overbearing quality many have described in Jose.
Also his biological parents sound like absolute scum, hanging him out to dry and then magically making contact with him with expressions of love and adoration once he'd made his millions.
Well said Brunel. You have said what I would have wanted to say. I hope this is a turning point for Dele.
I felt this was an important story so I moved the thread to the top. I will be away for the next couple of weeks so @SpursDisciple or @PleaseNotPoll will unstick the thread when they think appropriate.
I think you can all take a well-earned break. @Spurlock will look after the place while you're gone. We'll be fine.
Having just watched the interview, I think the club needs an investigation its medical team , not detecting Dele's reliance on sleeping tablets is a big miss considering his drop in form , along with the continuing delays in treatment with our players only to declare they need an operation 6 weeks later Poor show all round Edit : I forgot to add my utter disgust for the tabloids that hounded Dele and forced him to come out with this disclosure, a pox on them and their owners
This is the other side of the coin of hearing fans and pundits alike talking about the players' mentality: sometimes there is something a million miles away from football that is buried deep at the centre of a player's mind for every waking moment, and banging on about their mentality is unintentionally picking at that scab IIRC there was similar talk about Ronnie O'Sullivan's mentality early in his career, before it turned out the myriad of mental health issues he's been struggling with for the majority of his life and that was very quickly knocked on the head
That element really surprised me. It is a classic case of a club looking after its own interests before those of the player. Football like all sport is a results driven industry, getting those results is more likely is players are well rested and sharp, but that isn't always possible, so we'll solve that problem by creating other potential problems. Such measures should only be taken when absolutely necessary (I.e. the night before a game with an early ko or after travelling somewhere with a significant time difference), and should categorically never be in the player's hands to control, i.e. one of the club doctors should administer the dosage in person, instead of the lazy option which is to give players entire packets of the things and leave it to their discretion, which increases the risks of addiction.
I think Dele initially said that the club administered only one tablet but he later got more from a "doctor" and was taking them as and when he felt the need , I'm amazed that the club does not carry out random drug tests , when I was younger I was close to a place in the UK Archery set up and the subject of random drug testing was always on the agenda as it is an Olympic sport so for a professional international footballer to go undetected is shocking
Would sleeping pills trigger/show up in such a test? I think the tests only look for performance enhancing componants and i'm not sure these pills would contain any. May show up in a blood/urine test but not raise any alarm bells unless the quantity/frequency of injestion was known, could even have been seen as a good thing that he was getting regular good nights sleep if it just showed up in the tests.
