Aston Villa and Middlesbrough, they showed me what is English football. It's tough, it's difficult and they showed me how life is like in professional football.
Surely, sport is not fundamentally about the safety of athletes. If it were, we'd probably have to ban professional football, right after boxing.
It's none of our business, the sexual preference of people. So, I hope if someone's thinking about it, that if they do come out as gay and are a professional football player, and it makes them happy, and it makes their life easier, then I think they should do it.
Certainly, our work has identified CTE in many professional football players, but we're also seeing it in a very high percentage of college players.
I was just a kid who had arrived in the world of professional football and thought he could do anything he wanted. But I have learned from my mistakes. I have done everything to change, both on and off the pitch.
The pride and presence of a professional football team is far more important than 30 libraries.
I think, a lot of guys who want to be professional football players, they see the Premiership players, and they see the finished article, but there's a lot of hard work that's gone into their careers for them to get there. There's a lot of sacrifice, and I think people tend to forget that.
Since I was five or six years old, I just wanted to be a professional football player. I wanted to play against the best players. I wanted to play in big stadiums in front of big crowds, and I was desperate to play for my country one day, and thankfully, I was lucky enough that happened.
Even when I was growing up as a young boy, when I was playing schoolboy football, there were other guys who were as good as I was, maybe some even better technically. But I was prepared to stick to what was going to make me become a professional football player when I left school, and that was a lot of sacrifice and because my attitude was right.
If you want to become a professional football player at any level, when you're growing up, you have to make sacrifices, and it's very difficult. It's not easy, but you have to train hard, you have to live right, and you have to rest.
