Dele Alli has revealed he considered retiring from professional football at the age of 24 after documenting a series of mental health struggles in the recent period of his career.
Having burst onto the scene as a 16-year-old at MK Dons, Alli quickly became a household name at Tottenham, twice winning the PFA Young Player of the Year award.
The midfielder earned the reputation as a once-in-a-generation talent but his career took a turn for the worse following the departure of Mauricio Pochettino as Spurs manager.
Jose Mourinho succeeded Pochettino as Tottenham head coach in 2019 but the Portuguese failed to get the best out of Alli.
Since moving from Tottenham to Everton in 2022, Alli has struggled to find the form he previously showed during the early stages of his career, and has now opened up on the reasons why.
“It’s hard to pinpoint one exact moment,” said Alli, when asked by Gary Neville on The Overlap when things didn’t feel right.
“Probably the saddest moment for me, was when Mourinho was manager, I think I was 24.
“I remember there was one session, like one morning I woke up and I had to go to training – this is when he’d stopped playing me – and I was in a bad place.
“I remember just looking in the mirror – I mean it sounds dramatic but I was literally staring in the mirror – and I was asking if I could retire now, at 24, doing the thing I love.
“For me, that was heartbreaking to even have had that thought at 24, to want to retire.
“That hurt me a lot that was another thing that I had to carry.”
The 27-year-old also said he attended rehab in an effort to deal with his addiction to sleeping pills and his mental health struggles.
“I got addicted to sleeping tablets and it’s probably a problem that not only I have. I think it’s something that it’s going around more than people realise in football,” Alli said.
“Hopefully me coming out and speaking about it can help people. Don’t get me wrong, they work. I think with our schedule, you have a game, you have to be up early to train, the adrenaline and stuff.
“To take a sleeping tablet to sleep and be ready is fine but when your dopamine system is broken as I am, it can obviously have the reverse effect because it does work for the problems you want to deal with and that’s the problem. It works until it doesn’t.”
Alli went on to detail a traumatic childhood upbringing, but which took a positive turn when he was adopted by an “amazing” family.
The 27-year-old now wants to help others who are struggling with similar problems.
He said: “It’s been going on for a long time [my addiction], the things I was doing to numb the feelings I had. I didn’t realise it was for that purpose, whether it be drinking or whatever,” he said.
“There are things a lot of people do but if you abuse it and use it in the wrong way and you’re not actually doing it for the pleasure, you’re doing it to try and chase something or hide from something, it can obviously damage you a lot.”
