Dele Alli’s interview with Gary Neville is one of those pieces of work that jams a stick into the spokes of your internet day and immediately puts a stop to it.
If you haven’t watched it, don’t settle for scrolling through a two-minute clip on your phone. Find a way to carve out three-quarters of an hour for yourself and sit and listen. You won’t regret it.
Alli has a jaw-dropping story to tell. He was sexually abused by one of his mother’s friends at the age of six, after which he was sent to live with his father in Africa for six months in an attempt to discipline him. He was smoking at the age of seven, by which time he had his own key and no curfew, coming and going as he pleased.
He was dealing drugs at eight, riding around on his bike carrying hidden packages, on the basis that the cops wouldn’t stop someone so young. He was hung off a bridge at 11, eventually adopted and taken away from it all at 12.
Despite all that, he was a professional footballer just four years later, making his league debut at the age of 16 for MK Dons in 2012. He was an England international by 2015, he won the PFA Young Player of the Year award two years running in 2016 and 2017.
Imagine what you’d have to be made of to do all that while carrying such a harrowing childhood around. Or how deep a kid would have to bury his trauma to achieve what he did so soon after everything that happened to him. Not for the first time, the lesson roaring out from the screen is that we haven’t the faintest idea what sportspeople are going through.
Alli did the interview on the back of coming out of rehab just three weeks ago. He spent six weeks in a mental health facility in the US, dealing with an addiction to sleeping tablets. He’d have preferred to leave it for a while to tell his story but, as he puts it in the interview, the tabloids were onto it and he wanted to get out ahead of them.
Neville handles the interview beautifully. For all the shit he takes – plenty of it deserved – he has an obvious intelligence crossed with a not-so-obvious empathy. He doesn’t hurry Alli or chivvy him along. He sits back and lets him tell his story while still zeroing in on newsy details such as who was supplying him with sleeping tablets and how much responsibility football in general ought to take.
In a week when public service broadcasting has found itself bullwhipped on both sides of the Irish Sea, this was as good an example of it as you’ll ever come across. A professional footballer, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of most of us, laying bare the trauma behind his mental health struggles. A high-profile interviewer giving him the time and space and platform to do so but still keeping in mind that he is serving the people who are tuning in.
By the time the weekend is over, countless millions of people will have watched at least some of it. Neville’s initial two-minute clip, tweeted out on Thursday morning, had 48 million views as of Friday afternoon. Alli’s stated wish is to help one person by telling his story. Without ever knowing the true extent of it, he’ll have done far more than that.
How depressing, then, to have the enterprise funded by a gambling company, SkyBet. The interview was put out as part of Neville’s popular Overlap series on YouTube. SkyBet have been the driving force behind The Overlap from the beginning – if you don’t want to subscribe to it on YouTube, you can do so on the SkyBet Content Hub.
If you’ve been to one of the live shows, you’ll know that the first words uttered on stage are always: “Hello and welcome to The Overlap Live, brought to you by SkyBet”.
And look, as ever, it doesn’t do to be getting too puritanical about this stuff. You like a bet, I like a bet, SkyBet likes us to like having a bet. They’re owned by Flutter, who also own Paddy Power, who have grown from a small office in Clonskeagh to become the biggest betting company in the world.
If they want to spend even the tiniest sliver of those gazillions telling high-profile stories about the realities of trauma and mental health and addiction, well hallelujah. Maybe don’t hold your breath on that one.
They certainly got their money’s worth here. After a dynamite two-minute intro by Neville to set the scene, the title card says: “The Overlap Exclusive, brought to you by SkyBet”. There are two further inserts at the ad breaks and one at the end. Four in total, across a 43-minute interview.
One of them follows directly after Alli describes a scene where his adopted family were in tears, telling him how much they love him as a person and don’t care that he’s a footballer. He points out he was so numb at the time that he didn’t care. Within 15 seconds, we are being reminded that this brutal revelation of a dark moment of addiction is being “brought to you by SkyBet”.
And even if you don’t sit through the whole thing and only take in the two-minute clip on Twitter, you’ll see that it ends with the Sky Bet line. The advertising people are no fools either. Every other piece of writing in the clip – from subtitles to logos for The Overlap and YouTube – are static. Whereas ‘Brought to you by SkyBet’ is typed out as you’re watching, just to help it stick in your mind that little bit longer.
But, of course, the truth is we’ve all become entirely desensitised to this stuff by now. English football’s entanglement with gambling companies is so total, so intrinsic to the daily running of the game that it’s barely even worth pointing out the ironies any more.
And so Ivan Toney can get an eight-month ban for gambling – reduced from 15 months on the basis that he is a medically-diagnosed gambling addict – and still Brentford think it’s a good idea to sign a two-year shirt sponsorship deal with a gambling company a mere six weeks later.
When a progressive club like Brentford can’t see the harm in sending their star striker out as pitchman for the gambling industry, even as he is in recovery from his own gambling addiction, you’re really through the looking glass.
In that context, it is probably no surprise that Dele Alli’s interview – surely destined to become the most-watched, most-shared piece of football content in the whole off-season – came emblazoned with ads for a betting company. Most likely, it didn’t even strike anyone putting it together as being in any way odd or incongruous.
A grim, ominous sign of the times.
