Ex-Premier League star Troy Deeney: 'My dad used to beat us up. Football was my only escape'

Troy Deeney was born in Birmingham in June 1988. After unsuccessful schoolboy trials with Aston Villa in 2003, Deeney left school the year after to work as a bricklayer whole playing for semi-professionals Chelmsley Town. He became their player of the year for the 2005-06 season and was spotted by League Two club Walsall scoring seven goals in an 11-4 win, despite being drunk.

After a quiet start at Walsall, Troy Deeney scored 14 goals in the 2009-10 season and was awarded the club’s Player of the Year award. He signed for Watford in August 2010 and became a first team regular, the following season he became their top scorer. In June 2012, Deeney was sentenced to 10 months in prison after pleading guilty to a charge of affray, he was released after serving almost three months of the sentence.  

On returning to football, he became a Watford first choice and was made their captain for the 2014-15 season, which saw their promotion to the Premier League and Deeney becoming the first player in the club’s history to score over 20 goals in consecutive seasons. Watford remained in the top flight until 2020, followed by a season in the Championship and immediate promotion. Deeney left Watford on August 2021 as the club’s all-time top Premier League scorer and their fourth highest scorer in all competitions.

There followed spells at Birmingham City, the club he supported as a child, where he was made club captain, and Forest Green Rovers as player-coach.   

Speaking to the Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Troy Deeney reflected on witnessing domestic abuse as a child, his early love of football and the effects of unprocessed grief.

I left school at 15. I got kicked out. I wasn’t a bad kid. I was just… I think now they’d call it ADHD. I found school boring, it didn’t excite me and I didn’t see anyone from my area that was successful because they went to school. I need to see something to believe that it can happen. That’s probably why I made so many fucking mistakes along the way.  

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At 16 I was totally lost if I’m honest. I was going to building college but I only did that to copy my cool cousin, the one who always got girls, had a great haircut and a diamond earring in one ear – just a good looking bastard basically.

I knew I had to do something. My mum always said no kid of hers will be a bum. So we’re not allowed to sign on. We’re not allowed to not have a job. She used to work three jobs when we were younger. She’s not going to take any excuses for us being unemployed. But she was right. My mum’s my queen now, she is everything. She is my best friend. She’s my counsellor. She’s the strongest woman I’ve ever met in my life. She’s just fucking brilliant, man.  

We had a lot of instances when I was younger, around nine or 10, when life got difficult. I saw domestic abuse by my dad to my mum. It was a hard time but we had this old-school mentality which meant we didn’t speak about it. When I wrote my book, when I was 29 [Redemption: My Story], that’s the first time I spoke to my mum about it. It’s weird because I’ve got my nine-year-old understanding of what happened. The brain will block things out and give you like a sugar-coated version of reality. 

When my dad got arrested for beating us up, I don’t remember anything until about five hours later when I was in a neighbour’s garden playing basketball. My mum said, you don’t remember going to the police station and talking to them? But I genuinely have no recollection of it.  

Football was my only escape. It always has been. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have a football at my feet. No matter where I am, if a ball comes out I just forget myself. Nothing else matters. It’s my only pure joy if I’m being totally honest.

But when I was 16 I never thought football could be something I’d make a living from. I didn’t know anyone that was a footballer. I knew people from our area that played in the youth team for Villa, but they’d all been released or got kicked out for bad behaviour. So it was never something I thought you could get paid for. I was 24 before I really started to think, this could be my life. When I was a teenager, players for Birmingham City and Aston Villa were like superheroes. 

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I was doing well when I was 24. I’d been picked up by Walsall then moved to Watford and we’d just got promoted to the Premier League. But I was always trying to find a new version of happiness. 

My wife asked me recently if I was happy at those moments and I was like, well actually, no. I was always chasing something. I was always fearful that they were going to find out I wasn’t good enough. Even when I scored a great goal to win the match, I never really enjoyed any of it because I was thinking, there’s always the next one. If you look at my goal celebrations, I don’t look happy. I look angry. But there were some amazing moments. I will never forget the day when we played Newcastle away. We won 2-0 and I set up both goals. Thierry Henry said, if Kevin De Bruyne had done that pass we’d all be saying it’s world class. That was such a moment for me – Thierry Henry knows who I am! 

The information I would give my younger self would be stop, slow down, think. I always went at 1,000 miles an hour. I would just snowball into things. My mum used to call me the Tasmanian devil. I’d make a mess and leave. That’s ultimately what got me into jail [he served three months for affray in 2012]. I think it’s lazy thinking to blame my background on a low-income housing estate, where I was always being told I wasn’t good enough blah, blah, blah. When you actually look at a lot of highly successful people, they have similar backgrounds to me. It was a motivator for them.

Jail was the best thing for me in hindsight, but it never scared me. It wasn’t a big deal in my community. The guy across the street had just come home after doing four years. It’s a cycle. If one of your friends gets locked up, you’re just like OK, when’s he back? Life carries on.  

For a good while I had an anger at life. I blamed everyone. Yep, it was everyone else’s fault. I didn’t take no accountability for my actions. 

When I got arrested everybody was like, Oh my god, it’s shocking. But for me that behaviour had been going on for years. I was fighting all the time, it was a regular occurrence. I was drinking way too much, excessive amounts, then driving to football. 

But what I know now is that it was grief. I hadn’t dealt with anything. Within 18 months my great nan, my granddad and my dad all died. We’re Jamaican Irish so we don’t talk about feelings. We don’t go to a funeral to weep and wail, we bury the person and then we get pissed. When we get pissed, someone in the family has a fight with someone else and that’s when we know it’s time to go home. Even now, when my kids hug me I just get so uncomfortable with it. I can’t get used to it. 

My family has gone through such a big transition financially. This is a story I’ve not really told much but this one, it might make me cry. We used to watch videos of holiday packages on the VCR and my mum said one day, I’ll take you. And then in 2014… I’m getting emotional… sorry. We took the whole family to Disneyland in Florida. And as soon as she saw the Welcome to Disney sign she just burst out crying. And I was like, you did it. You said we would come here and here we are. If I told my younger self I went to America, he’d have said, who did you have to kill to get there?  

I still like pinch myself sometimes and just think, how did I end up here, this is great! I still struggle with it with my kids, because they don’t know any different. For example, getting on a plane… I never went on a holiday until I was 17. Now we get on planes fairly regularly, four or five times a year with the kids. Like, it’s great and I love it that I’m able to provide for them and they can have a great life. But as a kid, we went on bike rides and pulled up at the airport to watch the planes take off. That was the closest we could get to going on holiday.  

The only time I’ve cried at football was when we got promoted and I was so excited that I tried to call my dad and then realised he died two years before. I just wanted to tell him. If I could have one last conversation with anyone I would give anything to chat to him. Sorry, I don’t normally get upset. Sorry. It’s just… he never got to see me play in the Prem. He never got to see all of the good stuff that came. He never got to see the kids, he never got to be a granddad. And I always think, if I had sorted myself out a few years earlier, would he have lived longer? He got cancer but could he have changed his lifestyle? I just would have loved for the kids to see him and not see a gravestone.  

Troy Deeney is co-host of weekly football podcast Three Up Front with Simon Jordan and Graeme Souness.

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