Leeds United defender Max Wober has opened up about the mental health issues he experienced while out injured at Ajax that almost led him to quit football altogether.
The 25-year-old Austrian international has been a regular for Leeds United since joining from Red Bull Salzburg in January, but he admits he would never have made it to Elland Road if he had not sought support for his struggles with depressive symptoms during his time in the Netherlands.
Speaking as part of the Premier League’s Inside Matters mental health campaign, Wober said: “I had just started to come to the first team at Rapid Vienna and suddenly in the summer transfer period Ajax Amsterdam called me and said ‘OK, we really want to buy you’. The first few months were amazing – to play regularly in front of 50,000 people was my dream.
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“Then a couple of months in I got my first injury and from there everything changed a little bit for me, I have to say. I thought ‘I’m strong enough, I’m going to recover really quick so I’m going to be back’, but it took a little bit longer than I thought.
“My biggest problem was that I felt like ‘OK, now I’m not playing football anymore, this big part falls away from my life right now’, then suddenly I realised ‘OK, I’m on my own right now, I have no friends in Amsterdam, I have nobody I really know’.
“I just started to feel really lonely and tried to cover that a little bit when I was at the training centre because in football there’s a lot of testosterone in the dressing room – you always have to compete every day, otherwise you’re not going to be successful. Showing weakness, sometimes you can get the feeling that it’s not allowed.
“Putting on this mask towards your teammates is pretty easy because you’re just there for a couple of hours and when you’re injured you don’t see them all the time. But as soon as I came home I was home alone, didn’t even want to go out and buy groceries or whatever, so I’d just come home from training, lay on the couch, watch movies, fall asleep, watch movies, fall asleep, eat takeaway or something.
“Then at one point I couldn’t sleep anymore. I wasn’t open enough or strong enough to open up to somebody and it was just an awful time for me. I met my agent, we just had a genuine conversation about everything, and he also realised I wasn’t feeling well, so he started to give me a contact to someone I could speak to.
“When you’re in this situation you always feel you’re strong enough to do it by yourself and it’s just a small period in your life and it will go away, but it’s pretty tough to do it by yourself I have to say. I just said ‘OK, my life is a mess right now, I don’t want to be here right now, I want to be with my family, I want to see my friends’. The moment I really started to speak about things and open up, it was like a relief – it all came out like a waterfall.
“Right now I’m really really good, I’m feeling really comfortable. Through the journey I made struggling with mental health, I realised my personality is now stronger than before because I’ve overcome these situations. Without opening up, I think I wouldn’t be a footballer anymore.
“It’s not just footballers – in every profession there’s going to be people who come to work every day and just hide their feelings. I think it’s important in our society to speak about it.
“It doesn’t matter if you feel lonely, if you feel anxiety or whatever it is. It’s important to open up and accept that we can’t deal with it by ourselves, and I think talking about it really helps and can make a difference in your life.”
Anybody struggling with mental health issues can text ‘team talk’ to 85258 for free confidential support from the volunteers at Shout 85258. Further support is available via the NHS by calling 111, or if you or someone else is in imminent danger, call 999.
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