\n Kitson, who scored 62 goals for the Royals in nearly 150 appearances for the club between 2003 and 2008, also performing prominently for the likes of Cambridge United, Stoke City and Portsmouth.\n<\/p>\n
\n The 45-year-old powered the club into the Premier League in 2006 and hit double figures in three of his five seasons.\n<\/p>\n
\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.\n<\/p>\n
\n Read more\n <\/p>\n
\n Kitson said: \u201cI 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI\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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt started as something that wasn\u2019t about naming names. It was about explaining what happens in the industry and why.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n “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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cThe worst thing that happened was when I wrote a column about mental health called \u2018Sometimes There\u2019s Darkness Behind the Light\u2019.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cNobody 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.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cI submitted it on Friday. It went out Saturday. On Sunday, Gary Speed was found dead. That\u2019s when the Secret Footballer stopped being fun.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kitson, who scored 62 goals for the Royals in nearly 150 appearances for the club between 2003 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[128,130,129],"class_list":["post-117983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}