What happened to Dele Alli when he was a kid?: The England midfielder’s heartbreaking confession about his past

Dele Alli has given a devastating interview to Gary Neville in which he reveals his harsh and often brutal childhood, which led him to experience addiction problems to various substances.

The Everton midfielder and former England international has revealed that he was abused as a child by one of his birth mother’s friends and was hanged from a bridge by someone close to him at the age of 11.

“I haven’t really talked much about it, to be honest. I mean, I think there were some incidents that could give you a brief understanding,” Alli told Neville on his YouTube channel, The Overlap.

“So when I was six, I was sexually assaulted by a friend of my mother’s who was around the house a lot. My mother was an alcoholic and that happened when I was six. They sent me to Africa to learn discipline.” , and then they brought me back”.

Alli rose to fame as one of Tottenham’s best players in their improbable Premier League title in the 2015-16 season and was one of England’s stars on their way to the semi-finals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia. His career began to wane in 2019 when Jose Mourinho was his manager at Tottenham Hotspur and he struggled to get his career back on track when he joined Everton in February 2022. Last season, he had a failed loan spell with Besiktas in Turkey and spent six weeks in rehab in the United States. leaving the facility in June.

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Alli revealed that she had dealt with the trauma of her brutal upbringing throughout her career. He said he started selling drugs when he was eight years old and was exploited by gangs because the police would never suspect a child.

“When I was seven I started smoking, when I was eight I started dealing drugs,” he said. “An elderly person told me they wouldn’t stop a kid on a bike, so I rode my soccer ball and underneath that I had the drugs. At eleven o’clock a man hanged me from a bridge on the farm next door.”

There he explained that his biological mother was an alcoholic and that he was sent to live with his father in Africa and that he acted on purpose to be sent back home. After a year he returned to England. At age 12, his mother realized he was best placed for adoption, and Alli said his adoptive family had changed his life.

“I was adopted by a wonderful family, I couldn’t have asked for better people to do what they did for me. If God created people, they were it,” he said.

“They were amazing and they helped me a lot, and that was another thing, you know: when I started living with them, it was hard for me to really open up to them because inside I felt it was easy was to lose me again. I tried to be the best kid I could be for them. I stayed with them from the age of 12 and then started playing for the first team, professionally, at 16.”