Football faces a tidal wave of serious mental health issues with effects way beyond a pandemic

RENAISSANCE MAN MARVIN SORDELL HAS A STARK WARNING FOR THE BEAUTIFUL GAME

SINCE poetry, according to playwright Somerset Maugham, wears the crown of literature, Marvin Sordell is the king of football.

When the shadows were growing longer, and depression was suffocating his career on the pitch, Sordell wrote a poem called ‘Denis Prose’ – an anagram of depression – which became his definitive work.

It may not be Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley or Wordsworth, but none of them saw their talents wither on the vine after moving for £3million from Watford to Bolton on deadline day.

Denis Prose was an imaginary car passenger, Sordell’s morbidly powerful alter-ego, accompanying him on the drive home from training. The journey starts in bright sunshine but, by the time he has reached his destination, storm clouds have gathered and he is consumed by the darkness.

Seven years ago, Denis Prose almost had the final say. Alone and miserable in a hotel room, Sordell attempted suicide. He was surprised to wake up.

The poem was three years in the making before he published it on Twitter.

If Sordell’s fellow professionals were circumspect at first, he is now an influential crusader tackling mental health in football after climbing off the hamster wheel to retire at 28 and set up his own TV production company.

When Sordell – once the best young player in the Championship and a Team GB forward at the London 2012 Olympics (above) – warns that football is facing a tidal wave of serious mental-health cases, with far-reaching effects beyond a pandemic, the game would be well-advised to listen.

His latest project, Football Exposed, a 10-part series due to be aired later this summer in collaboration with

Yahoo, pulls few punches. Sordell said: “We tell the story of one player at a big club who was struggling with a knee injury which, despite several operations, wouldn’t heal. His club put him on anti-depressants because they thought it was all in his head.

“Years later it transpired the surgeon had performed the wrong operation at the outset, which is why the original problem never went away. The player was right all along.”

The stigma attached to mental health was once a short cut to being shunned in sport.

But as the likes of Olympic cycling

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gold medallist Victoria Pendleton, England cricketer Marcus Trescothick, and heavyweight boxing champions Tyson Fury and Frank Bruno discovered, the sunlit uplands are sometimes dark and lonely at the top.

Sordell said: “We have a long, long way to go in football before we can say we’ve tackled the attitudes and stigmas around mental health.

“Many times in my career I found myself struggling and was told to man up and get on with it. One manager threatened to make my life a misery if I didn’t take a pay-cut and leave.

“Danny Rose tells it like it is – more than anyone in football, people should listen to him, even if they don’t like the bluntness of his message – because he doesn’t hide the truth.

“If he was playing in

League One, he would be a hero for speaking out... but because he earns big money in the Premier

League and plays for

England, in some eyes he is a whinger.

“Being rich or famous in the public eye doesn’t make you immune to depression. Denis Prose could be the passenger in any footballer’s car.”

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