Stan Collymore Tackling My Demons

’Everybody thinks I underachieved as a footballer. Everybody always says I could have done so much more. I want to nail all that. I didn’t underachieve. I overachieved. I had a great career. I played for Aston Villa, the club I had always wanted to play for. I played for Liverpool, one of the most famous names in world football. And I played for my country.’

Stan Collymore

Stan Collymore was widely acclaimed as one of the most talented footballers of his generation.  In 1995 he became Britain’s most expensive player when he moved from Nottingham Forest to Liverpool but just four years later, at the age of 28, he had booked himself into The Priory to treat depression, unable to play at all.  So what went wrong? How did this charismatic centre-forward change from bright young star to a man on the verge of self-destruction? 

In STAN: Tackling My Demons (published by CollinsWillow, priced £18.99), Collymore looks back at his roller-coaster career and the obsessions and excesses in his personal life which at one stage threatened to destroy him completely. It’s a brutally honest and at times harrowing autobiography, exposing the dark and often seedy world shrouded behind the glamorous façade of professional football.

A veteran of nine clubs in the English league Collymore is better placed than many to talk about the culture of football in this country. In the book he speaks eloquently about the pressures that are put on young players, both on and off the pitch, and how, if like him you don’t fit in, the pressures can become overpowering. He talks about his experiences at each club from his early days with Crystal Palace to playing for Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, Aston Villa and Leicester City, and reveals that Martin O’Neill, manager at Leicester when Stan arrived, was the only manager who ever really understood him. 

In STAN: Tackling My Demons Collymore looks back at his early years growing up as a mixed race child in a predominantly white Staffordshire town, where his first memory was seeing his father beating his mother.  In a particularly honest passage he admits that when years later he hit his then girlfriend, the TV celebrity Ulrika Jonsson, in a bar in Paris during ‘six seconds of madness’ the tremendous guilt he felt was compounded by the hurt he would cause his mum and the thought that he was acting ‘just like his dad’.

Collymore talks openly about his many relationships with women including Ulrika and other TV personalities such as Davina McCall, Kirsty Gallagher and Sara Cox, and why he has been unable to sustain a long-term relationship.  He talks about being shamed for his voyeurism in a Cannock car park earlier this year, and of his continuing battle against depression and sex addiction.  He also speaks about the love for his mother and his two children, and his optimism for the future.

About the author:

Stan Collymore was born in Stone, Staffordshire in January 1971. He has played professional football for Crystal Palace, Southend, Nottingham Forest, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Fulham, Leicester and Bradford City, and won three England caps in the nineties. He retired from the game in 2001 and was until recently an expert football summariser on Radio 5 Live. He has recently starred in The Farm, the latest reality TV show on Channel Five, and is involved in a series of other TV and radio projects.