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Dean Sturridge first started putting bets on at the age of seven and was hooked on gambling throughout his 15-year professional career - Andrew Fox for The Telegraph
It was not until Dean Sturridge had long hung up his boots that he faced up to being an addict during his entire 15 years as a footballer, a career that started with earning a first professional contract at Derby County and gambling away the signing-on fee within hours.
Back then, in the 1990s and 2000s, Sturridge was scoring goals in the Premier League but hiding his secret. In the toilet cubicles of dressing rooms or the massage table as he received treatment, he would be gambling on horse racing. When everything was going well, he would not gamble. But when there were struggles or injuries, he had a bet virtually every day of his career.
Sturridge had grown up with the bookmakers as a second home. At seven, he could barely see over the counter but was asked to put on bets for his family if the cashier turned a blind eye to age limits. Football was merely an extension of that, so when Arthur Cox gave Sturridge a first professional deal, raising his £37.50-a-week YTS wages dramatically, his first instinct was to put some bets on.
“My first signing-on fee as a professional as an 18-year-old was thousands of pounds,” he said. “Within hours of receiving that signing on fee, I’d lost it at the bookies. I had a car waiting for me that was ordered beforehand and I couldn’t pay for it. The one and only time I borrowed money from a team-mate was for that so I didn’t have the enjoyment and the joy of buying my first car.
“Ford Fiesta Firefly. Red, with black trim at the bottom. I can remember like it was yesterday.”
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Dean Sturridge spent 10 years as a professional at Derby after signing his first contract in 1991 at the age of 18 - Shaun Botterill/Allsport/Getty Images
Just going through the logistics of gambling that amount of money shows the lengths at which Sturridge would go in order to bet. He would get £500 maximum daily limit from a cash point, then go in person to an HSBC branch where he would write cheques for cash at £1,000 at a time.
“My first car was a feeling of pain in a way, an embarrassment and guilt in not being able to fund it myself,” he said. “I knew something wasn’t right, but because you get conditioned from a young age as a footballer, when you get tackled, get up, get on with it and there’s that masculinity. When you go into a professional environment, it’s definitely exacerbated in that you have to be a certain way and conduct yourself in a certain way.”
Those pressures for footballers are still there, as they are in all walks of life. Sturridge is an ambassador for the Gordon Moody charity that is providing residential treatment for gambling addicts. Speaking at their treatment centre in Redditch, he says gambling was almost constant in his career.
“I’d go with team-mates to the bookies. But also in the changing rooms, young players would sweep and clean up after the senior pros. You’d see the Racing Post and Sporting Life on the benches on the sides and people talking about it.
“But before I became an academy player, when I was 13 or 14, I won thousands of pounds and that was when you think you’ve got a secret system that nobody else knows. That addict has that kind of mindset that you’re thinking: ‘OK, I can get one over the bookies’ or that this is a way of me getting money regularly.
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Sturridge scores against Arsenal in 1997, one of the 32 Premier League goals he scored for the Rams which makes him the club’s record goalscorer in the competition - Stu Forster/ALLSPORT/Getty Images
“Horses were my poison. When I got into football, then it might have branched out to a bit of golf and tennis and greyhounds, but football, never, thankfully. You’re doing it on the way to an away game, you’re playing a card school, team-mates are losing huge amounts of money before a game.
“I would go to the changing-room toilet before the game to put a bet on an hour before kick-off. Or listen or watch a race with the colours. I wouldn’t listen. I’d turn the volume down because I’d be in the toilet, and I’d be looking at the colours of the horse that I’d backed.”
Sturridge ended up playing 155 games in the top flight and is still Derby’s record Premier League goalscorer. But lingering at the back of his mind is whether gambling impacted his preparations for games. The worst times were when he could not prepare for games as he was out injured.
“Whenever I cross the white line, it’s out of your brain because you’re concentrating on something you love. But surely, in the process of preparing for the game, it must be there and affect you, and you try [to] compartmentalise it.”
His own family have first-hand experiences of gambling difficulties, with nephew Daniel Sturridge, the former Liverpool and England striker, banned for four months after breaching the Football Association’s betting rules.
Now 51, Dean Sturridge still believes the same masculine environment exists in football, even if there is better support for today’s players.
“This generation have more of a voice and can articulate themselves better than my generation, but I still feel we are in a world of football where you’re fearful to show vulnerability or frailties,” he said. “I’m trying to send the message to say, you’re not alone, I had those feelings. If you could speak out and just connect with somebody and talk about it, because you’d have a better football career and a better life after football also.
“I feel there needs to be something more in place where it’s consistent, once a week, or once a month, where somebody’s consistently coming in and giving a message, so then you’re soaking it up as a person.
“We had sports psychologists that came in like Bill Beswick, who was at Derby, and eventually Steve McClaren. Didn’t ever bring it up to me, never ever asked me about it. It was only as I got older, it took me over 40 years ultimately to realise: ‘Wait a minute, you are an addict.’”
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Sturridge was made to feel alone with his problems during his successful career and wishes to emphasise to people struggling with addictions today that help is readily available - Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
Sturridge says time is the most valuable commodity he lost while his gambling was out of control. Never fully engaged in conversations with family and friends, the turning point came on December 3, 2019, when his wife came back home unexpectedly early and saw him watching horse racing on television.
“I had the horse racing on the TV and had said I wasn’t gambling as much, and when she came back and as soon as she came in the living room, I just broke down,” he said.
“At that stage, I was probably thinking, I’m only losing money here. But then through recovery, I realised money is important, but more important is time, losing connections, being present and being fully invested.”
As a team-mate of Paul Gascoigne at Wolves when the former England midfielder was on trial at Molineux in 2003, Sturridge says his plight is just another example of how addictions can take over when things go wrong in football.
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Sturridge played with Paul Gascoigne during the latter’s unsuccessful one-month trial with Wolves - Nick Potts/PA
“I did feel sorry for him. I knew that he’d gone through a lot and he had been affected mentally because of how his career had gone,” Sturridge said.
“I can remember going back home to my partner at the time and saying: ‘He’s in a bad way.’ And you know it because I played a game with him, a reserve team game and he couldn’t complete a pass and he broke down off the back of it. When you are happy you don’t need that escapism. But as soon as things start going wrong that’s when I’m looking for something to help me in that process of dealing with rejection and not being able to play the game I love.”
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