One kick away from walking: Five Premier League players who nearly quit before it began

Football careers are sold to us as straight lines: academy, debut, glory. The reality is more fragile than that.

For some of the Premier League’s most celebrated players, there was a moment, quiet, desperate, or just bone-tired, when they almost didn’t make it at all.

Here are five of them.

Ian Wright

Before he was Arsenal’s record scorer, Ian Wright was a plasterer. He’d spent eleven years being rejected by club after club, Arsenal, Chelsea, Brighton. And, by the time Crystal Palace came calling for a trial, professional football was so far from his mind that he almost turned it down.

He signed semi-professional terms with Greenwich Borough while still providing for his family as a plasterer. In fact, he actually turned down three approaches from Palace before finally agreeing to a trial.

He was 21, practically ancient by modern standards. A friend talked him into going. He’d been working as a plasterer and had trained as a bricklayer, having been rejected after a number of trials as a teenager, but once Coppell saw him, there was no sending him back.

Wilfried Zaha

A month before his debut, Wilfried Zaha had struggled to secure a place on the wings of a competitive Under-18 team. The boy who would become Crystal Palace’s greatest ever player very nearly didn’t get his shot.

Growing up, Zaha was an unassuming, quiet boy who kept himself to himself, and that reserve nearly cost him. He had to watch games he should have been playing, stewing on the fringes of a youth setup that wasn’t sure what to make of him.

The frustration at 19 was real enough that walking away felt like an option. That he didn’t, that he forced his way through and made 458 appearances for the club, is one of south London’s great sporting stories.

Danny Rose

Nobody knew that during his long injury rehab, Rose’s uncle had taken his own life. It triggered a depression that the Tottenham left-back had been quietly carrying ever since. “I was getting very angry, very easily. I didn’t want to go into football, I didn’t want to do rehab.”

He was diagnosed with depression and referred to a psychologist by Spurs, eventually opening up publicly before the 2018 World Cup, as per The Guardian.

The tragedy is that by the time he spoke out, he wished he’d done it sooner, and the England career that followed in Russia showed what was possible when he had the right support around him.

Jesse Lingard

Jesse Lingard came close to taking a “timeout” from football during lockdown. He battled mental health issues. “I could have easily quit in lockdown,” he said. “I could have been like, ‘nah, I don’t want to do it, I quit, I give up’. But the fight in me always brings me back to life.”

He’d spent almost two years invisible at Manchester United, playing matches where he felt like the game was just passing him by, like he just didn’t want to be there.

The West Ham loan that followed was one of football’s great second acts: nine goals in ten games, England recalled, the real Lingard back.

Michail Antonio

Antonio’s path to the Premier League didn’t run through any academy. It ran through Tooting & Mitcham United. The ninth tier of English football, where he was playing in front of crowds of barely 130 people.

“We didn’t have much money growing up and my dad always said to me that football wasn’t a real job,” Antonio recalled. “I remember going home one day and telling my brother that I was going to give up football because I was 17 and was too old.”

His brother refused to let him. He got Antonio his first pair of real boots, and those were the boots he managed to become professional in. From there it took nine clubs, years of loan spells, and relentless grinding before he finally reached the top flight with West Ham.