Darren Eadie interview: Depression saw me turn my back on football

“I turned my back football for many years,” says Darren Eadie. “It wasn’t because I did not like the game. Because I loved it it was and I couldn’t do it anymore. Imagine your fire – anything you get up for – and then being told you can’t do it . Being told it’s OK as you can still see your mates get it done. It’s so tricky.”
Retirement comes to every footballer than he would ever have imagined, but the ending for Eadie came.
He was a winger, including for those in Europe while still a teen. When he became an inaugural member of the club’s hall of fame he was playing. However, knee injuries mared his move to Leicester. At 28, his career was finished.
“It was more the shock than anything else,” he informs Sky Sports. “I had had injuries to my knee before and always return from it I always believed I would return from the subsequent one. So to awaken from an operation and now have my wife walked there along with the physio sat there and also the surgeon sat there telling me how that my profession was completed at 28 was a enormous shock.”
Looks that were 251 had been created by eadie with 81 of these coming in the Premier League. He had been tipped for stardom for a child but he was anticipating a very long career ahead of him even though his injuries had promised those peaks weren’t going to be reached. Retirement was not the strategy.
The plan needed to change.
“It’s like being chucked out of a fish tank and suddenly you’re flailing around on the floor not knowing what to do. It is a different atmosphere. That was the problem for me. It was not only that I had been out of soccer. It was that I was learning how to fit into society because it is very different to being in a football room.
“You have this type of resilience for you personally as a footballer. When you have a game you tell yourself that there is another game on the corner and you’ll have the chance to put it. That is the way I attempted to handle it. I was only going to place it and try to enjoy my retirement. But that quickly fades.
“It calls for different life skills and you have to know that pretty fast. I think putting it was probably the oddest thing I have ever completed. I must have spoken to people right away. However, I tried to put a brave face and bottled everything up, put it away, covered it up. After a time, which takes its toll”
Eadie suffered from melancholy.
There were tears. Panic attacks. Sometimes he couldn’t leave the house. Other times he needed to call his wife to come back and get him.
“It was a gradual process,” he describes. “In football, you need a little bit of stress to perform with. You require stress. However, this was a lot. I made excuses to not observe folks. I made excuses not to go out. That is when you realise you are becoming deeper and stronger.
“There has been a stage once I hit rock bottom and my wife was great at that time. She was having to deal with a child . I became someone who was needy. You wind up hanging on their every word. All it’d take is just one’incorrect’ word and I’d be down in the depths again so that I think there should be more support for those families as well.”
Could football do much more to help?
“The problem when you finish early is that you are a commodity. Just as you might be valued by them when you are done, when you’re searching to them you are done. You can’t help them. I am able to comprehend that. It’s a company. But when you are dealing with human beings there is a little more to it. You can’t treat people like products.
“Times have changed. The comprehension is so far superior than it was and rightly so. Since you are not mentally perfect, the manner football sees it, even if you aren’t emotionally strong then you will be quickly discarded by a supervisor. They will only say how they can help and his mind isn’t appropriate without considering the reasons for it, to play.
“I really do think the PFA needs to do more. This is the largest game on the planet but I think cricket and rugby are way ahead in addressing those problems. A great deal of time in football it is just lip service. People say what other people wish to hear and then don’t return to it”
Life stays tough for Eadie. Eighteen months ago he lost his mom to a brain haemorrhage that was sudden. But the favorable for him now is that he’s finding a means. He’s in a place that is much better. “There are always things to handle in life but overall day-to-day life doesn’t look so bad anymore,” he says.
“You learn when you’re going through a bad period. The thing is that when you have been through the event before you realize there is an end to it. The issue is whenever you’re currently going the first time, you are moving down and down, and you think there is no ending to it. That’s when individuals take their own lives.
“If you have an incident and get through it, that’s when you discover they become briefer, you can cope and you also develop processes to deal with this. I’d recommend anyone who suffers those things and has those sort of ideas to see someone. The more time you jar it up, the longer you wait patiently to see a doctor, the more challenging it is going to be.”
Eadie is now enjoying his job running a football programme at an independent college – at Ipswich of places – and can be involved in a different venture that is new that is exciting too. He helped establish a YouTube show FC Kitchen looking at soccer and meals in a funny manner, intending to increase awareness of the advantages of eating a plant-based diet.
“For those who have kids yourself you tend to check out the bigger picture and try to be more responsible,” he says. “So it’s a tie-in in terms of veganism and consuming less meat. I’ll always eat meat but it is about providing an alternative and looking at how we could slow down our impact. We’re pitching vegans against cats ”
Eadie is having fun. His involvement in football is no more limited to his work at school either. He is watching football, after turning his back on the match. There is even some work for Norwich TV.
“It is normal to drift back to somewhere you had nice occasions,” he adds. “I’m finding it more enjoyable watching football again now.”

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