Former Stoke City footballer Tony Kelly has described how gambling took over his life, with rising debts and family breakdowns contributing to problems on the pitch.<\/p>\n
He said he had lost more than \u00a3500,000 to gambling after what started as “a bit of fun”.<\/p>\n
Kelly, who grew up in Coventry, spent three years at Stoke where he enjoyed some of the biggest moments of his football career, including winning the Football League Trophy in 1992 and scoring an equaliser against Liverpool in the League Cup in 1991.<\/p>\n
In his new book, My Redemption, he said that hiding his gambling problem affected his mental health, relationships and ability to play football.<\/p>\n
Kelly said his gambling began at 18 when he was playing for Dulwich Hamlet in London and joined team-mates in placing football accumulators as a way of fitting in.<\/p>\n
“It was a bit of fun, wanting to fit in with a new group,” he said.<\/p>\n
But things changed in 1990 when he joined Stoke City and started gambling at casinos.<\/p>\n
“The casinos were really my big downfall,” he said. “I accumulated a whole load of debt.”<\/p>\n
“It controls you,” he added. “It becomes a compulsion.”<\/p>\n
Kelly said his performance in matches became “sporadic” as his gambling debts and personal problems grew. <\/p>\n
He said debt, depression, stress and anxiety, as well as “family breakdowns and falling out with friends”, meant he struggled to focus on football.<\/p>\n
Kelly said his gambling cost him two houses and led him to file for bankruptcy in 2009.<\/p>\n
After years of hiding his problem, Kelly appeared on BBC Breakfast in 2013 to talk publicly about his addiction.<\/p>\n
“That was the time that I owned my addiction and came out of denial,” he said.<\/p>\n
Two years later, he founded Red Card Gambling Support, a non-profit organisation that educates people on gambling addiction and provides support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Stoke City footballer Tony Kelly has described how gambling took over his life, with rising debts and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":782013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[102,1906,6623,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-782012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}