‘If I didn’t go to jail, I would have been dead. It was like a hard reset for me – I had to sit for 13 weeks in jail and figure out who I was’ Troy Deeney on turning his life around following his prison spell

Few players in recent history have had a footballing journey quite like that of former Watford striker Troy Deeney.

The 37-year-old went from non-league Chelmsley Town to the Premier League with the Hornets, via a three-month prison spell in 2012 and a four-day stint on a ventilator after contracting Covid-19 in 2020.

During his career, Deeney would make more than 700 appearances, scoring 217 goals and the player himself admits that his story is barely believable.

Troy Deeney opens up on his playing career

“No, not at all,” he tells FourFourTwo when asked if he could have imagined the journey he would go on during his time at Watford.

“The first 18 months were representative of where I was at – mentally all over the place, not turning up, not applying myself in the right way, and not realising what an opportunity I actually had,” he admits.

“I always had impostor syndrome – ‘this will end soon, they’ll kick me back out and I’ll go back and play with my mates’. I had this big fear of, ‘Oh God, it’s going to be over, it’s going to be over’. Unfortunately, it took my dad getting sick and me getting arrested to make me realise I needed to liven up.”

During the first half of 2012, Deeney’s father battled throat cancer aged only 47, while the striker became embroiled in an early-hours brawl outside a club in Birmingham. Deeney, his brother and two other men were charged with affray, after an attack on a group of students left one with a broken jaw.

Aged 23, Deeney responded on the pitch with the best form of his Watford career so far over the remaining weeks of the 2011-12 campaign. “I’ll give him the credit every time, Sean Dyche was brilliant for me,” he says. “For his first six months as manager, I hardly played or played on the left wing, but he kept challenging me and telling me, ‘You’re going to quit’. He understood there was not a quitter in me, so he kept trying to go, ‘You’re going to quit, you’re going to go back to doing this or that’.

“Then he handed me an opportunity when Marvin Sordell moved on. I took it – we were playing Millwall away and I scored. I got 10 goals from January through to the end of that season, but then ended up going to jail.”

Three days after attending his father’s funeral that June, Deeney was given a 10-month prison sentence. He served just over three months of it, and admits that he wouldn’t have hit the heights he later reached as a footballer had it not been for that time in jail. “No, I would have been dead – if I didn’t go to jail, I would have been dead,” he emphasises, repeating his words to make clear that he really means it. “I was living too recklessly away from football, but all things happen for a reason.

“There was a family on the other side and I never ever want to glorify what I did, there was a victim so I don’t ever want it to come across as that. On the flip side, it was like a hard reset for me. I had to sit for 13 weeks in jail and figure out who I was – ‘My dad’s dead now, what’s going to happen?’

“I buried my dad on the Friday and went to jail on the Monday, so I had to figure out what was going on and why I was being like that. All while surviving, while not knowing how my career was. In jail, all you have is time. You’ve got nothing but time, you’re just sat there.

“I write a lot, I still do to this day. I’ll write and write, and I think. I remember writing down a list. What am I going to do when I get out of here? It was like, ‘I’m going to have a career, I’m going to buy a house, I’m going to buy a car’. I was making good money, sure, but I was also going out every week, and had a leased car and a rented house. Then when you get locked up and stop being paid, it’s like, ‘Oh s**t, actually I haven’t got anything’. It was the hard reset that I needed and hopefully from that, I’ve made my dad and my grandad, the people who passed away, really proud of me. I certainly hope so.”