Clubs could face legal action if something goes wrong: Whiteside
the blinkers taken off. It was only then that I realised you can’t look at other people, look outside of yourself, look for something to come along and give you this life you always dreamed about. You have to start making it happen for yourself.”
The last of the talented group of Spurs youngsters who reached the FA Youth Cup final in 1995 to be offered a pro deal — a one-year contract at the princely sum of £200-a-week — his new mental approach reaped quick rewards.
When his close friend Rory Allen made a first-team breakthrough, scoring at White Hart Lane against the Man United of Ferguson, Beckham, Scholes and Keane in front of the Sky Sports cameras, instead of looking at his fellow striker like he once had Klinsmann, he used it as motivation that he could do the same.
Within a matter of months he had, making his debut up front alongside Teddy Sheringham when Spurs travelled to Villa Park and then scoring on his home debut against Coventry.
Life, especially in football, is not often linear and while there were setbacks along the way — being deemed too small for Spurs by new boss George Graham was one, getting told he wasn’t good enough to be a professional by then Norwich manager Nigel Worthington another — his new-found mental resilience remained. So too did the fiercely independent streak.
If an appetite for reading weighty, 500-page motivational tomes or the weekly fourhour round trip to see a sports psychologist in his early days would have been considered an oddity in the now anachronistic environment of 1990s English football, it was nothing compared to the reaction of his Norwich team-mates when he would arrive at training with his yoga mat in hand. But for every one that was to end up stolen, torn to pieces, burned to a cinder or driven over by teasing team-mates, Mcveigh would arrive the next day with a replacement.
Not a stereotypical footballer then and the contrast is even more stark now. For as much as he loved the game, and continues to do so, he baulks at the oft-repeated cliche that every athlete dies twice, the first of which is signalled by retirement.
Hanging up his boots injury-free at the relatively tender age of 32 after helping the Canaries back into the Championship, he takes greater satisfaction from his second act as a keynote speaker. Only last week he was hand-picked to deliver a speech to Microsoft, the lockdown meaning it was delivered via video rather than in person at the company’s offices in Singapore.
“What I understood maybe a little earlier than some is that ultimately, a football career is an extrinsic experience,” he says. “There’s so much you don’t have power over. If it was intrinsic, I’d have gone to Old Trafford as a kid and said I was signing for Man United.
“For me, I can do the best I can, and give myself the best opportunity, but at some stage someone else is going to decide things for you and decide you’re not getting that contract.
“But if I have 20 things in my life and one of them is football, when that time comes, you’ve still got 19 things in your life. It’s about identity really and how you see yourself. I played football every day of my life from before I remember until I was 32 but I never saw myself as just a footballer.
“I remember you’d be walking into the Spurs physio room and seeing the old pros, the likes of Gary Mabbutt, the great captain, a footballer who had been around and seen everything you can see and done everything you can do in professional football.
“At that stage, he’d be 35 or 36 and it would take 45 minutes to an hour for the physio to strap him up and crack him and manipulate him into a position where he could even go out and train. You’d be seeing this but in that same room you’d still hear things like ‘Play as long as you can’, ‘You’ll be a long time retired’, ‘These are the best days of your life’.
“I remember sitting there thinking I don’t think that’s true, or I hoped it wasn’t true anyway. The inference is that once you stop playing it’s all downhill, nothing will be as enjoyable again. But knowing what I know about the nature of beliefs, I chose to think about it differently and ultimately when I decided to stop playing, it was the best decision I ever made. The breadth of my life, the quality of the experiences I’ve had in the 10 years since, are so far beyond what football has given me.”
For Mcveigh, those opportunities have brought him right across the globe, speaking for companies like Cisco, PWC, Investec, Barclays and Grant Thornton in Asia, America and closer to home.
Having gone to work alongside Gavin Drake, a sports psychologist he knew from his time at Norwich, in his immediate post-playing days, it was a week-long course in Florida that set him on this path to keynote speaking.
When a Norwich newspaper picked up his story in the midst of his old side’s run to Premier League promotion in 2011, it led to Mcveigh (below) giving a speech to Aviva on the subject of leadership. Back when he’d made his Spurs debut in front of almost 40,000, he could remember sprinting through the warm-up as others jogged such was the adrenaline.
Stood in front of 150 of the insurance company’s employees, he felt more nervous than he ever had on a football pitch.
“It was terrifying,” he says. “Playing football, you’ve been doing it for so long, it’s a challenge but it’s not new. With keynote speaking, I was a novice. But it’s like anything, everything is learned whether that’s playing football, being a concert pianist or speaking in front of multi-billion pound companies. Learning a new skill, any skill, it comes in stages. I’ve started keynote speaking with the same approach I had to football. I work hard, I learn, I analyse my performance, I learn from others. “To be where I am, speaking to Microsoft last week, it was a proud moment because I knew how much work had gone into me getting to that point in my career, my second career. I was blessed to have a first career doing something I love and now to be able to share these experiences, these learnings and these insights, doing something I’m passionate about, it doesn’t get any better.”
He hasn’t fully left football behind and is still enjoying the game whether it be five-a-side with friends or turning out for Spurs Legends sides.
Indeed, not so long ago he had the chance to pull on Norwich colours again too, playing against an Inter Milan old boys team to mark 25 years since the Carrow Road side’s one unforgettable Uefa campaign.
Up front for the visitors, none other than Jurgen Klinsmann. Plenty had changed since that first day together at Tottenham. No longer the doubt-filled teen, Mcveigh had long since proven he had what it takes to make it as a professional footballer. And much more besides.
The Crues chief says Irish League clubs should exercise extreme caution before restarting the game.
Players are naturally concerned about contracting the virus and passing it onto a more vulnerable member of their family.
And Whiteside even fears that in the tragic event of a player losing his life, a club could face a corporate manslaughter charge.
Crusaders, who sit third in the Premiership, are among the topflight clubs content to see the season declared over.
“I’ve heard people talk about testing but that won’t be relevant to us,” said Whiteside.
“Unless the government relaxes the social distancing rules we cannot play. If something happens to a player, you could be looking at corporate manslaughter.
“Players are employees and they have rights. Clubs will not be insured and they will be held responsible for the health and safety of the players.
“There’s people dying out there and businesses are failing. The government won’t be allowing football to return in the near future.”
It also appears highly unlikely clubs will be flying around Europe competing in qualifying matches this summer.
“The season is going to end and there are doubts over whether there will be European qualification matches for our teams,” added Whiteside. “The smaller nations may not feature.
“We are behind everyone in terms of how we respond to this virus.
“The optimistic hope is the game returning by mid-september.
“The transfer window can’t open until the Irish FA say the season is over and players are coming out of contract at the end of this month and their situation needs to be resolved.
“We had submitted a discussion document about the way forward but it would need unanimous support.”
NIFL also said that they will weigh up the impact of the IFA’S player registration sub-committee meeting next week, which will consider the issue of Irish League players who were due to come out of contract at the end of the 2019-20 season.
All football activities have been suspended in Northern Ireland since March.
Various domestic leagues are shutting down their seasons in the way they feel is appropriate in the far from ideal circumstances. If the season does not resume, NIFL must address the promotion and relegation question, the destination of the Gibson Cup, the European places and Uefa funding allocation.