The saddest thing, perhaps, when Luke Chadwick reflects on his years at Manchester United and remembers the cruel jokes, week after week, that shaped and disfigured his life is when he makes the point that “it should have been the best time of my life”.
He was 18 when he made his debut for Sir Alex Ferguson’s team in 1999. They were the European champions, winners of an unprecedented Treble the previous season and Chadwick was another product from the club’s conveyor belt of young talent. Life should have been wonderful.
Instead, Chadwick became so worn down by the jokes about his appearance — the punchline, every time, being that he must have been hit with the ugly stick — that by the time he had reached the age of 20, he felt too anxious, too wrought and unhappy, to go out sometimes. Even a shopping trip would feel like an ordeal. Or something as routine as going to a restaurant. Mentally, he often just wanted to shut himself away.
He can also remember Nick Hancock, one of his main tormentors, approaching him a few years later when Chadwick was playing for Stoke City in the division below. Hancock was a Stoke supporter and the presenter of They Think It’s All Over, the primetime BBC comedy panel game that had poked fun at Chadwick’s looks for longer than he would care to remember.
“He never mentioned the show but he did ask for my autograph,” Chadwick says. “He wanted me to sign his son’s programme. I thought he might say something like, ‘Oh, sorry about that time on TV’ but, no, nothing like that.”
It probably says a lot about Chadwick’s nature that he obliged with the request and that, despite everything, there is no appetite on his part to pick a fight with Gary Lineker or any of the regulars from the same show. One of them, Rory McGrath, lives a few miles away in Cambridge. “It’s not as though I see him and think, ‘There’s that *******’,” Chadwick says. “I don’t feel any bad will to any of them.”
But there are glimpses of hurt. “One of the disappointments was that, as a kid, I remember watching England in the World Cup and Lineker was one of the heroes of the team. So to hear him saying negative stuff about me, even if it was something silly about the way I looked, was sad for me.”
Perhaps you saw Chadwick’s post on Twitter last week when, new to social media, he disclosed something that he had kept to himself for the best part of 20 years.
As a young footballer the abuse I received about my appearance affected my mental health a lot. The feeling of embarrassment stopped me talking about how I felt. Although uncomfortable at times, it’s so important we talk about our feelings to get through the tough times.
Chadwick is 39 now, a father to two teenage boys, and comfortable enough in his own skin to talk about his experiences. He hopes that by going public in a discussion about mental health, it might help to give others the confidence to speak out. His tweet has been liked 17,000 times and there have been 1,100 retweets. “I’m not a huge fan of fame, or people knowing who I am, but when I see the messages I’ve had from people saying, ‘Thanks for doing this’ then sharing their stories, I can’t tell you how good that has made me feel. I never expected that, really.”
For a long time, though, Chadwick can remember feeling shamed into silence because of the jarring occasions when he heard “people saying I was ugly and that my teeth stuck out”.
Ferguson, for one, had no idea that his player was so troubled. Many of Chadwick’s former team-mates will be finding out for the first time. And yet nobody at the time — not at the club, or in the media, and certainly not the people who were targeting him for a quick laugh — seemed to consider it was wrong, or unfair, and tried to stop it happening.
Opposition fans picked up on it. Football humour can be brutal sometimes and Chadwick grew so accustomed to hearing that he was ugly, or that his looks were an affront to other people, he tried to close himself off.
“I was always so anxious about going out,” he says. “Even if people didn’t say anything to me, I was worried they were thinking that about me or that someone might say something. All I would really do was go training, then come home and stay in my flat. And if anyone asked me if I was all right, it was always, ‘Yeah yeah, I’m fine, it’s just what I want to do’.
“I wouldn’t say it affected me on the pitch or that it was the reason why I didn’t have an incredible career at Manchester United. It was more how it affected me off the pitch. I would be anxious going out. Even going to the Trafford (shopping) Centre, it was always in the back of my mind that someone might say something negative to me or that people would be looking at me a certain way.
“Everything was about my appearance and the way I looked off the pitch. I just found it really hard to deal with. I was a really quiet, shy boy. I didn’t speak much anyway and it really stunted my growth as a person.”
For that, it comes back to a television show that ran for 11 years on the BBC and, at its peak, attracted 12 million viewers.
“They Think It’s All Over was such a hugely popular show back then,” Chadwick says. “When they started bringing it (my looks) up, they were bringing me to the attention of millions of people.
“I remember the first time and someone texting me to say, ‘Nice appearance on They Think It’s All Over’. I was so shocked because I was quite naive back then, even if I was playing occasionally for Manchester United. I’d been brought up in a little village south of Cambridge where nothing really happened. I never realised I was famous and that people knew who I was.
“I looked at that text and I thought, ‘Oh no, what’s this?’. Then more people started talking about it. I watched it the next week and I could see people laughing at these jokes about me. It was obviously funny to other people but, to me, it didn’t feel like that. It was on every Friday and then the next day, when the game was on, it was fresh in people’s minds.
“After that, I would dread every Friday. I wasn’t a hugely confident guy anyway and this just made it worse. I used to half-watch it, hoping and praying that they would stop. But they never did. It just carried on and on. Because it was silly and childish, if it had happened once, I don’t think it would have been that much of a problem. It was the continuation every single week that really got to me. They would bring me up every week.
“I have always asked myself whether I should have tried to speak to them (the BBC) about it. As a 19 or 20-year-old boy, would it have been possible to speak to someone at the BBC and stop them talking about me? Or would they have carried on anyway? You’d like to think it would have stopped. But I don’t know. At the time, it was just accepted.”
Chadwick was a winger with the speed and directness that encouraged Ferguson to bring him into the first-team squad as an understudy for David Beckham. Chadwick became a regular for the England Under-21s. He won a league championship medal and has found it amusing — “not sure if it’s a compliment or insult” — to find various messages such as “Chadwick 1 Steven Gerrard 0” being sent to him by United’s followers.
Yet his memories will always be tarnished by the fact that, unbeknown to anybody else at Old Trafford, he was often in a dark place.
“I should have worn a brace as a child but the thing I was most scared of in the world was the dentist,” he says. “I would do whatever I could to escape going to the dentist’s. I’d get away with it and get away with it, and by the time I got to Manchester United, I had a problem with my jaw protruding back. It was affecting how my jaw would lock. I had to have (surgery) or it would have meant problems as I got older. The jaw had to be moved forward to make the bite come together and, after that, I wore a brace for a couple of years.”
He became, in turn, an easy target. “Every time you get off the bus as a Manchester United player, you expect a bit of abuse. It wasn’t just me. But there were two occasions I really remember. One was at Bolton where we had to walk quite a long way and a couple of lads were following me, abusing me the whole way. The other time was at Fulham and, again, because I was so shy I just looked at the floor. I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do? Shall I say something back?’. I’d stay silent and carry on walking.
“If they knew how much it affected me, I’d like to think most people are decent enough they would have known not to do it. But I never really talked to anyone. I remember a couple of the younger lads laughing about it. I’d laugh along, too, because I didn’t really know what to say. There was no way in the world I would have ever been able to speak about it with the manager. My parents would ask me if I was OK and I’d just say, ‘Yeah’ — but looking back now, as a parent myself, it must have been horrible for them.”
The encouraging part is that football clubs have much more of a support network these days and there are counsellors and mental health experts available. Footballers know, on the whole, that it is easier to share their feelings. That was not the case for Chadwick, though he also makes the point he did not seek help either. “It was a different world. In terms of mental health, it was more a case of ‘Pull yourself together and get on with it’. It’s completely wrong but that was probably my attitude about feeling down. Nowadays, there is so much more acceptance.”
It is also unthinkable, in the modern world, that a popular television show could get away with this line of humour, over and again, picking on a player who admits he did not have the “emotional intelligence” to cope with all the ridicule.
Maybe you can also remember the treatment of Jason Lee, as the “pineapple head,” on the Fantasy Football League show hosted by Frank Skinner and David Baddiel. Lee, then at Nottingham Forest, has spoken about seeing the funny side, even though it involved Baddiel painting his skin black to imitate him. Yet the player in question has also described it in the past as a “form of bullying” and said that it hurt his family.
“As a child, I’d watch that show,” Chadwick says. “I would chuckle along but now, having gone through it, I completely understand how he felt. What he went through and what I went through — there are a lot of similarities.”
Chadwick retired from playing in 2015 and was given a standing ovation from the Old Trafford crowd in his final match, playing for Cambridge United in an FA Cup tie against the 20-time league champions.
He has coached in Cambridge’s academy and is now involved in the Football Fun Factory, where the emphasis is on positivity and enjoyment. He sounds happy. He tells his story with no bitterness. The bad times, he says, have helped him “build a lot of character and resilience” and the response on Twitter has convinced him it was the right thing to do.
“I wanted to put out a serious message, particularly bearing in mind the situation we are all in at the moment,” he says. “It’s the lockdown that has given me time to think about everything. I’m sure there are millions of people who are really struggling, so the message was to be open and speak about your problems. I can’t change what has already happened but if I can get a positive message across, using my experiences, it might help other people.”
