Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
Perhaps the best place to start this story is a cell in a police station, where a 28-year-old Luton Town footballer sits with his head in his hands and tries to piece together what happened.
What has happened: a teammate of Shaun Whalley has been accused of headbutting someone in a nightclub (he was cleared of any wrongdoing) and Whalley was not charged with anything at all. Still, he was quickly sobering up and wondering how he had got here.
It’s a phrase Whalley uses a fair bit about those years: “Wrong place, wrong time.” But, as he himself concedes, that phrase is typically used to indicate misfortune or happenstance. In fact, Whalley has put himself in similar places too often for something not to go wrong.
What were the chances then, I wonder, of Shaun Whalley being a roaring success in the Football League nine years later, a leader of a team at 37? In the week we meet, Whalley was named League Two Player of the Month for his performances in taking Accrington Stanley away from serious trouble. After 20 years in professional football, this is his first monthly award. Right place, right time.
Watching Whalley now is to see a man determined to squeeze everything out of his playing career, but then that’s always been his style. He describes himself as a “schoolyard footballer”, and you see the point. He wants to get on the ball. He wants to run at players. He wants to create and score. Some managers, he happily concedes, may have considered his style hard to coach. At Accrington, John Doolan doesn’t seem to mind.
There’s an impudence to all this, but steel too. Last month, Whalley scored a chip against Crewe that had the hallmarks of Eric Cantona vs Lionel Perez in 1996, only from wider and further out. That combination of experience and determination, all blanketed by the desire to have fun, is instantly attractive to a neutral football observer.
Both sides of the Shaun Whalley story is laid bare in the basic framework of his career: league, non-league, league, non-league, league. The natural talent was always enough to get offers from Football League clubs and the inconsistency of his personal life was reflected, eventually, on the pitch. Then the cycle would begin again.
Accrington Stanley 0-0 Cheltenham Town
- Game no.: 61/92
- Miles: 120
- Cumulative miles: 10,231
- Total goals seen: 174
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The least eventful game I think I have ever seen live. That in itself is enough to be memorable.
“I just used to enjoy being with my mates and doing what they were doing and it was hard for me to say no,” Whalley says. “No, that’s not true. It wasn’t hard, I just didn’t want to say no. I didn’t have any responsibilities. I was living with my Mum, I didn’t have any bills to pay and I just used all my money on going out.
“My best mates used to always say ‘You shouldn’t be doing this with us’. But I would get this nagging feeling that everyone was going to miss me, or maybe fall out with me for not being there. That’s not the case at all – you are not the main character in everyone else’s story. But that was never my mentality and it took years to change.”
In 2015, after that night in the cells at Luton, Whalley was signed by Shrewsbury Town in League One. It was the highest level he’d ever played at and he stayed at it for seven straight seasons, often as a starting winger.
That’s all the more remarkable given the extent of the alcohol issues he is now detailing publicly for the first time, and begs the question of how high uncaveated talent may have taken him. At the same time as the drinking, Whalley was also gambling and says he was in a headspace where he didn’t really care if he lost money or how much.
“It used to start on a Thursday or Friday, which obviously isn’t good for a footballer,” he says. “Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday – then by Sunday night I would be in a world of trouble and pain in my own body. I would think ‘I’m done here’.
“Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I’d want to be in bed, trying to recover, feeling sorry for myself but full of anxiety about what I had done. But then someone else would be going out on a Thursday, I’d get a call and something would switch. I’d fancy it and then the whole thing started again.”
Two things happened to Whalley that changed his life and helped him out of that cycle. Firstly, his son was born and that responsibility caused a necessary jolt in the need to grow up. Shaun says that he matured emotionally far too late, and that nobody could have convinced him that he had a serious problem. He did go to therapy and thinks that talking helped, but only by getting there himself could he make the decision to stop.
Whalley also learned to accept that he has an addictive personality that requires constant management. And, if he gets that right, he can replace negative addictions with positive ones. One of those addictions can be football. That, he says, is why he’s still playing now and why he has done his ‘A’ coaching licence.
“If I can focus on one or two things – football and my little boy – then good things will happen,” he says. “That is what will drive the next part of my life: planning for the future is crucial.
“What you don’t want to do is to stop playing without a plan, because my mind will fester if I have nothing else to focus on. So I can keep playing, help the younger lads in the team to be better players and humans and be a leader on the pitch. That’s how to manage an addictive personality.”
Whalley has not had a drink in 18 months. After years of trying to manage alcohol, going teetotal was the answer and he says that he has never felt better. He might never have played better, either. No older attacking player in the country has started more Football League games this season. Few have scored goals better than Whalley’s.
Just as importantly, those fears about losing his friends, missing out and having too much spare time have eased. The mates that matter will always stick with you and they’re the only ones you want anyway.
“Obviously I still have friends and they’re even closer to me than they were then,” he says. “There was just a group of people that I might call ‘going out mates’, and we shared those times. When you don’t share that thing in common, they tend to drift away.”
That was a different Shaun Whalley. The ability to manage addiction and football was always mighty difficult, but get into your mid-30s and your body starts to wear and the juggling act becomes impossible.
It’s to his credit that he was able to recover, but Whalley also knows that so many others had careers that fell away before they could do it. The other phrase that he repeats over and over: “I’m one of the lucky ones, Daniel.”
“I’d say that 99 per cent of the problems I have had in my life have been down to alcohol,” Whalley says. “Alcohol was the main protagonist in every scene that I didn’t like. I had to either make a change or be in the same place time after time. I got out of it. I’m still playing. I have my boy. I’m so lucky.”
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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