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Dave Kitson wrote five books and a newspaper column as ‘The Secret Footballer’ (AFP via Getty)
Former Reading and Stoke City striker Dave Kitson has revealed himself as ‘The Secret Footballer’.
Kitson wrote five books under ‘The Secret Footballer’ pseudonym and had a weekly newspaper column with The Guardian during the 2010s.
The 46-year-old, who also played for Cambridge, Sheffield United and Portsmouth, says he stopped writing newspaper columns following the death of former Leeds United, Newcastle United and Wales midfielder Gary Speed in 2011.
‘I am The Secret Footballer. I’ve never said that out loud before. It was an idea that came to me when I wasn’t happy with where football was going and I needed an outlet to express it for my own mental health,’ Kitson said in an interview with Champions Speakers.
‘I’ve been writing since I was a kid. It’s a passion. As I said, I wanted to be a travel writer. The writing was cathartic. It helped me process what was going on in football, things that just didn’t make sense to me at all.
Dave Kitson wrote five books as ‘The Secret Footballer’ (Amazon)
‘It started as something that wasn’t about naming names. It was about explaining what happens in the industry and why.
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‘I would write and leave people to form their own opinions. It was fun for a while, then it bred huge anxiety. I had a career and a big contract. If I’d been outed, I would have been sacked and ostracised. Now everyone has a podcast and an outlet. Back then, it was genuinely new.
‘It changed football in this country and led to overhauls at the highest levels, which I’m proud of. But the stress and anxiety were immense.
‘The worst thing that happened was when I wrote a column about mental health called ‘Sometimes There’s Darkness Behind the Light’.
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‘Nobody talked about mental health in football then. If you spoke about it, you were seen as weak. I said there was a mental health epidemic and I predicted it was only a matter of time before someone took their own life.
Dave Kitson says he struggled with guilt after Gary Speed’s death (Getty)
‘I submitted it on Friday, it went out Saturday and on Sunday they found Gary Speed dead. That’s when the whole Secret Footballer idea and concept became not fun any more. It gave the column this credibility in the worst possible way and it was really difficult, and I suffered and struggled with guilt for a long time that I hadn’t written that column earlier and that we might have prevented what happened from happening.
‘And then I just became so angry at the authorities for being really passive on the issue of mental health and not doing enough and not helping and I still feel anger towards them but fortunately the people that were in those positions are no longer there and things have changed and things of things have got better.
‘But that tragedy was just the most horrendous thing that could ever happen I felt such sympathy for his family and it was so unnecessary and that was the day that ‘The Secret Footballer’ went from being a sort of a cult column to this thing that everybody was now going to as this as this sort of bible on football and like I say, it was credibility in the worst possible way, and I just not long after stopped and I just stopped and I disappeared and I stopped writing.’
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