Former Reading and Stoke striker Dave Kitson has revealed himself as ‘The Secret Footballer’, saying his anonymous exposes into the modern game “stopped being fun” when Gary Speed died.<\/p>\n
Kitson wrote five books and had a weekly newspaper column during the 2010s under the pseudonym, detailing his frustrations with the game.<\/p>\n
Guessing his identity, which he has now revealed in a YouTube interview, was a passion for fans on the internet, who tried to solve clues.<\/p>\n
Kitson, who also played for Cambridge, Sheffield United and Portsmouth, said: “I am The Secret Footballer. I\u2019ve never said that out loud before. It was an idea that came to me when I wasn\u2019t happy with where football was going and I needed an outlet to express it for my own mental health.<\/p>\n
“I\u2019ve been writing since I was a kid. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
“It started as something that wasn\u2019t about naming names. It was about explaining what happens in the industry and why.<\/p>\n
“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\u2019d been outed, I would have been sacked and ostracised. Now everyone has a podcast and an outlet. Back then, it was genuinely new.<\/p>\n
“It changed football in this country and led to overhauls at the highest levels, which I\u2019m proud of. But the stress and anxiety were immense.<\/p>\n
“The worst thing that happened was when I wrote a column about mental health called \u2018Sometimes There\u2019s Darkness Behind the Light\u2019.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“I submitted it on Friday. It went out Saturday. On Sunday, Gary Speed was found dead. That\u2019s when the Secret Footballer stopped being fun.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Reading and Stoke striker Dave Kitson has revealed himself as ‘The Secret Footballer’, saying his anonymous exposes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-304343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}