Marcus Maddison officially retired from professional football in the dressing room at the Macron Stadium at half-time, broken by the sport that had given him his livelihood but at the same time taken so much out of him.
The breaking point came at Bolton back in April, substituted with his team losing to Harrogate Town in front of an empty stadium. It was his third club in less than a year, the pressure of lockdown and a career fighting against the conformity that football expects of its players finally forcing him – finally – to confront of his demons head on.
“I struggled for a long time with everything but I just put it the back of my mind and got through it,” he tells i.
“To be honest I used to think every morning: ‘If I crash my car, I won’t have to go into training’. Even when I was playing well at [former club] Peterborough, that used to go through my head.
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“All the crap that comes with the game doesn’t interest me. It’s managers telling you what you have to eat, you’re told when you have to do this or that. The fans criticising you if you have a bad game – it’s hard. People think footballers are robots but they’re not.
“I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks it, but players don’t say it because they know managers don’t want to hear it and fans don’t want it. It’s a job.”
Maddison is not your average footballer. Born in County Durham, he was in Newcastle United’s academy before being released – along with the rest of his age group – while the team prospered at the top end of the Premier League.
A gifted forward who played off-the-cuff, he got an early glimpse of how the sport can sometimes treat its mavericks. “Alan Pardew was the manager and he sent Hatem Ben Arfa down to train with us [the under-23s]. Supposedly he was overweight but I didn’t see it. The guy was unbelievable, going past people for fun,” he said.
“I guess it shows you what the sport can do if you’re a bit different.”
Maddison freely admits he is that. His family urged him to get another job but he “backed himself” to make a living from the sport. Nurtured by Gary Mills at Gateshead in the National League, he moved to Peterborough where he spent six years.
He carved out a reputation of a scorer of great goals and flourished under Darren Ferguson, who gave him licence to play in his first spell. He had less fun with Steve Evans and Graham Westley who – in Maddison’s words – was prone to “sending 11pm text messages with motivational nonsense in them that I just deleted”.
“A lot of managers just want robots,” he admits.
“They just want players who will execute exactly what they want but if I didn’t agree with what the manager wanted me to do, I wouldn’t do it.
“Say we had a gameplan and it wasn’t working, I’d try and do something I thought could work. I had a few fallouts with managers because of it but I’d say down the years, more often than not it did work out.”
Continually linked with a move away from Peterborough, he grew frustrated that scouts and managers couldn’t see past his reputation. And behind-the-scenes, he was battling anxiety and depression that came from “living in tiny apartments in places I didn’t know anyone”.
It culminated in the North West. He tells i: “Everything about that move to Bolton was wrong. The TV fell off the wall as soon as I got there, I crashed my car in the first week, got sent off in my first game. It was loads of little things that made me believe: it’s not right.
“The last straw for me was getting dragged off at half-time. I just thought: ‘I don’t want to be here. I don’t need to do this, I don’t need to be here and I don’t need to be feeling like this’. I packed my bags and came home.
“They went on to win the game, they were celebrating and I was literally sat there, hating my life. My mental health was shot. I felt left out, I felt so alone, nobody valued me and I’d had enough. I made my decision.
“I called my agent, told him to tell Bolton. I needed to leave. Luckily the manager understood my situation, and so did the owner. I appreciated their backing but I was going home.”
Desperate to get a degree of control back, he decided to swap football for full-time gaming and launched his own Twitch channel “Official Mad Gamer“, streaming his games of Fifa and others.
His mental health has recovered, he feels “more relaxed than ever” and is hoping his new life will grow to the point where it begins to play the bills.
“I was looking around for things I could do. I played seven or eight hours a day when I was a footballer, so it seems like the natural thing to do,” he said. He currently has just over 2,000 subscribers on Twitch.
“Gaming takes years and years to build a community and make money from so at the moment, my stream is just a few people. Hopefully it pays off in the long-term, if I don’t I’ll have to get a job!
“I don’t have masses of money, I only played in League One my entire career so my money might run out soon-ish. The talent for football is still there so I do believe I can come back and play in League One if I need to.”
Lately, the urge to play has returned. He has begun rehabbing the meniscus injury which has prevented him from kicking a ball for months. The 2022-23 season could yet see him return.
“It won’t be for a while and if I do it, it’s on my own terms,” he says.
“I just want to be judged on how I play the game, not the other stuff. And I back myself to be able to do it well.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3ep1OPE
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