Sunderland’s Aaron Connolly has revealed his struggles with alcohol addiction after bursting onto the scene with Brighton as a teenager.
Connolly scored twice in his first Premier League start against Tottenham as a 19-year-old, but subsequently fell into addiction.
The 24-year-old, signed by Sunderland as a free agent in September after his Hull contract expired, sought help over the summer and has now opened up about his struggles.
“My phone was blowing up (after the Spurs game),” Connolly told Sunderland’s website. “It was one of the best days of my life but also one of the worst because the following five years came from that.
“I stopped working, stopped doing the things that I should have kept doing. I started to believe the hype and I didn’t turn into a good person after that. I was tough to be around, no one could tell me anything. I didn’t know how to deal with it, to be honest.
“I didn’t feel like I had that authoritative figure to keep me grounded. I always say to my parents that I started to live the life of a footballer without the football side of it and that was the hardest bit to admit at the time – that I wasn’t doing all the things that had got myself in that position. It hurts to look back at it and speak it.
“I had problems off the pitch and it was highlighted a lot. I lost track of myself, lost track of why I was playing football, chasing things that I was never chasing before that Tottenham goal.
“It was obvious I had a problem with alcohol. I had my parents who never drank and would always advise me whenever I went out to stay away from it because of addiction to alcohol in my family.
“I didn’t listen, it got me in a lot of trouble. It became something I relied on. My buzz used to come from football, scoring goals, winning games.
“It got to a point where the buzz was more from drinking alcohol. I used to look forward to the games finishing so I could have time to go and get drunk.
“I decided at the end of July that it was too much, I couldn’t do it, live the way I was doing. It was killing the people around me, family and friends. Mainly it was killing me. I had one of my best seasons at Hull last season but off the pitch my life was a mess.”
Connolly scored eight goals for Hull last season, more than he has in any other campaign, but his life off the pitch was unravelling, and it led to him going to rehab.
He says it was “the best and worst month of my life”.
“There’s no price tag or there’s no amount of money in the world that can cure it, it’s a disease, it’s an illness and I never thought of it like that until I decided that I needed to go to the clinic,” he added.
“I learned so much stuff because I always thought when I was going in there – and I decided to go in there in the two weeks leading up to it – am I being dramatic, do I really have a problem?
“I’m not going to go into detail about the stories and the stuff like that, that’s stuff that I don’t need to go into detail about, but if people knew the stories they’d understand why I went in there because it was getting to a point where it was just a dark, dark place if I’m being completely honest and I didn’t know where else to turn apart from professional help.”
