Editor’s Note:  This story was included in The Athletic’s Best of 2020.  View the full list.

He was the kid with the everyman name and the uncommon talent. “Michael Johnson? He was fantastic, incredible,” says Sven-Goran Eriksson, who was his manager at Manchester City . “You should ask Dietmar Hamann about him. He said he was the best young midfielder he ever played with.”

Really? “I’ve never seen anything like Johnno at that age,” the former Bayern Munich, Newcastle, Liverpool , City and Germany midfielder confirms. “He was probably the most complete young player I’ve seen.”

More complete than Steven Gerrard or, for example, Michael Ballack? “In terms of ‘complete’ at that age, yes,” Hamann says. “Stevie always lived off being so dynamic. Stevie was never the most disciplined ? and if anything, that sort of free-spirited nature made him an even better footballer ? but Johnno was more of a strategic player. He would read the game. He would be two or three steps ahead. He had this instinctive knowledge where everything he did was right. It just came to him with such ease. He was so gifted.”

Johnson announced his arrival on the Premier League stage as a 19-year-old on a balmy Wednesday evening in August 2007. He was just inside the Derby County half when he received the ball. Three opponents were closing in, but the City midfielder took two touches and accelerated away, leaving them trailing in his wake.

He was 40 yards from goal, a line of yellow shirts in front of him, but as he moved forward he knew just what to do. He sought out the quick feet of his Brazilian team-mate Elano, who, with perfect timing, laid the ball into his path.

Charging forward, Johnson was only 30 yards out now. He took one touch with his left foot to set himself up ? 20 yards now ? and, with another defender sliding in, he produced a quite outrageous flick with the outside of his right. The ball curled beautifully beyond the goalkeeper and inside the post.

The net bulged, the crowd roared and, as Johnson jogged away and smiled, raising his hand in celebration, he was mobbed by his team-mates. Beyond the boy-next-door appearance ? rosy cheeks, a sort of awkward teenage smile-cum-smirk ? he looked like someone who was in supreme control of his destiny as a footballer

It was, quite absurdly, the first league goal City had scored on home turf since New Year’s Day, but suddenly it felt like a new dawn for the blue half of Manchester. They had a new, big-spending, eager-to-please owner (Thaksin Shinawatra), a world-renowned manager (Eriksson), an exotic array of new signings (led by Elano, Geovanni and Martin Petrov) and, at the heart of it all, a homegrown midfielder whose was drawing comparisons with the great Colin Bell.

Four days later, Johnson held his own against Michael Carrick, Owen Hargreaves and Paul Scholes as City beat Manchester United 1-0. Then came another eye-catching solo effort against Aston Villa . Again it showed a rare combination of poise and power as he charged from midfield. Shades of Gerrard. Shades, certainly, of Kevin De Bruyne .

Johnson was a natural: the physique, the technical ability, the game intelligence that is so rare in players of that age. There was just one thing he lacked. Without it, he couldn’t be what everyone ? Hamann, Eriksson, City’s supporters, his friends, his family ? wanted and expected him to be.

It has taken years to persuade Johnson to sit down for an interview. When he announced his retirement in January 2013, saying at the age of 24 that he wished to be “left alone to live the rest of my life”, he meant it. Calls and emails went unanswered, as did a note posted through his letterbox.

He doesn’t remember any of that. He has only vague recollections of an interview with the Daily Telegraph in 2015, when he spoke in guarded terms about struggling to deal with the pressure of life in the “toxic” world of professional football. Maybe that says something about his state of mind at the time. He wasn’t ready to share more than the vaguest details of his story back then. He is ready now.

The established narrative arc of Johnson’s career would go something like this: spectacular breakthrough, a lot of hype, a big contract, some untimely injuries and, from that point on, a loss of focus, drive and motivation as depression took hold. Some of the reports around the time of his retirement suggested that people at City felt he had gone “big-time”, spending “too much time in nightclubs and casinos”.

The “big-time” accusation is a familiar one when a footballer fails to fulfil his early promise. It suggests someone who has taken his eye off the ball, someone who has become too distracted by the trappings of fame ? the flash cars, the bling, the nightlife ? and, above all, someone who has become seduced by the hype.

It is a convenient narrative and he certainly admits he spent too much time in pubs, clubs and casinos ? and, yes, there was an infamous visit to a kebab shop ? but it is also misleading in this case. Too much too soon? Big-time? Believing his hype? Johnson’s problem was the complete opposite of that.

If he has to chart the beginning of the end for him as a footballer, it isn’t the various injury problems that restricted him to 23 Premier League appearances in that 2007-08 season and only a handful of appearances after that. Neither it is the huge five-year contract he signed in September 2008, an important statement from the club after the takeover by Sheikh Mansour.

No, the beginning of the end for Johnson was the rush of publicity and praise that followed his breakthrough a year earlier. Not because he believed the hype. Not because success changed the way he thought about himself. But, frankly, because it didn’t.

“This is why I wanted to do the interview,” Johnson says in the back garden of his home in Urmston, Greater Manchester. “I want people to be able to understand mental health and self-esteem. My issue was always self-esteem. I just felt really low in myself. I didn’t ever feel I was as good as the kids next to me.

“I’m not talking football-wise. I knew I was good at football. I’m talking about how I felt as a person. I used to think, ‘You’re not like those lads there. You can’t be their friend’. Little things like that. This is what you get with low self-esteem. You look at yourself in the mirror and you feel like it’s someone else looking back at you.”

These are not sentiments you would expect to hear from someone who, through his teens, was rated as one of the outstanding football prospects in England. A familiar assumption, where teenagers are concerned, is that sporting prowess brings popularity, which in turns breeds confidence. Johnson was popular enough, but confidence, he says, was a huge problem.

“My personality was laid early ? 10, 11, 12,” he says. “My mindset was just really low. Really low. I had no confidence, no self-esteem. My way of dealing with it was to play and to be the best. And if I’m the best, I’m worth something.

“Eventually, when I started playing in the first team, when I’d sort of ‘made it’, when I was playing regularly, that motivation that I had… it just went overnight. I always thought I was going to feel better about myself by playing football and by being in the first team. When I didn’t get that, when I didn’t get that relief, it was, ‘Oh, actually I don’t feel better’. That light at the end of the tunnel just went.”

There is an awful lot to unpack there. We will go back through it, stage by stage, but first, he talked about that period when he made the breakthrough at City under Stuart Pearce in 2006 before really coming to the fore at the start of the following season in a new-look team under Eriksson, thriving alongside Hamann as well as Elano, Geovanni and Petrov.

“I made my debut against Wigan,” he says. “We got beat 4-0. We were a poor team then, a bang-average City side struggling in the lower half of the league. But I didn’t have a bad game. And even though we got beaten, it was more of a relief just to have played. Once you’ve made your debut, that’s a great feeling. You’ve played in the Premier League. That was great.

“When Sven came in, I had loads of motivation. I was coming through, working hard, playing well. I do remember that when I played, I always felt good after the game. There was always that high and that adrenaline. After scoring those goals (against Derby and Villa), a couple of winning goals, it was a bit euphoric. The problem for me was the day after ? the days after ? when that adrenaline went down and it was just back to me being me.

“It was the comedown. I suppose I was looking for it to make me feel better about myself. And then when I was out, I would be anxious ? scared of people looking at me, scared of someone asking me a question, just nervous. And I would be like, ‘I thought it was going to give me all this confidence, being a footballer’. It should have done. I had put all my worth on achieving in football. But it sort of had the opposite effect on me.

“I was thinking, ‘Why the hell do I feel like this?’ And it’s not just that I wasn’t feeling better about myself. I was feeling worse than before. Suddenly, I didn’t have that hope of getting better. That hope was what had kept me going ? thinking that, if I could get into the first team, I would feel better. But that had gone.

“It’s such a flawed way of thinking, isn’t it? It was all going to come crashing down when I realised that everything I had been working for was wrong. That was like the light at the end of the tunnel disappearing. It was like someone just turned the light off and I didn’t know where to go.”

What about all that praise from Eriksson and others? Didn’t that boost his confidence? “No, because that praise was for football,” he says. “I knew I was a good footballer. I always had a sort of unwavering belief in myself as a footballer. There was no doubt in my head that I was going to play football.

“But this was about everything else. Feeling I wasn’t as good as the bloke next to me, not feeling confident, not feeling like half the person that other people felt like. That was it. So even when I was praised in a football sense, it didn’t give me that confidence outside of football. So that motivation that used to get me up every morning ? training every day so I could be the best I could be and become that confident person I wanted to be ? just went.”

Injuries troubled Johnson from an early stage ? a hip problem, an abdominal issue that required a double hernia operation and, later, a serious knee ligament injury ? but he doesn’t regard them as the overriding factor in his demise as a footballer. Even before then, he says, things had started to his unravel as his illusions of happiness were shattered.

The first reports about Johnson’s “lifestyle” issues appeared in the summer of 2008, shortly after Eriksson was replaced by Mark Hughes, but again he feels they missed the point. Yes, there were times when he went out too much, but no this wasn’t the hedonistic, carefree streak that others presumed.

“I was dealing with things the wrong way,” he says. “I had too much free time. I went out too many times, going to nightclubs or whatever. It was always to try to feel better about myself. And it was unhelpful. I was going out and having a few drinks as a way of dealing with my emotions, to try to give myself a temporary high and feel good about myself for a short period. Maybe people perceived that as, ‘He doesn’t give a fuck’, that sort of attitude. But it was the opposite. This is the thing with depression. When you’re stuck in that mindset, you find any way you can to try to make yourself feel better.

“I was injured quite a lot. That didn’t help. It’s well known that you can get those natural endorphins by playing and exercising, but, especially after I had surgery on my knee, I wasn’t getting that release either. And that didn’t help. But the biggest problem was me ? or my feelings. I just didn’t have any self-worth.

“I was going in every day to do my rehab, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. It was just another day of putting on this face, trying to get through the day, hoping no one would ask me any questions, hoping no one would look at me when I get my milk and eggs on the way home. People would look at me and I would feel anxiety, nerves, all this stuff.

“It was debilitating. And for someone who’s shy or anxious, going into the public eye isn’t really befitting, is it? It was probably down to thinking people were judging me, but it was an instinctive reaction. It’s those animal instincts ? fears and stuff ? and it became so instinctive that I would just be nervous all the time and I couldn’t understand why. All of this was in my head. When you’ve got nothing but negative thoughts, it’s a struggle, a daily struggle.”

Did he confide in anyone ? his parents, his sisters, his friends, his team-mates, his managers or coaches? “Do you know what? I didn’t speak about it to anybody,” he says. “This is the problem with people not talking. I think women are good it. They’ll get on the phone and speak to their mates, won’t they? With lads, there’s still a culture of, ‘Come on, get that beer down you. You’ll be alright’. And for some people, that is all they need. But if you’ve got bigger issues, you need to be able to deal with it in a better way.”

Did nobody notice he was struggling? “Probably not,” he says. “I was always pretty good at hiding it, bottling things up and getting on with it. I didn’t want to cause too much of a problem.”

It seems extraordinary that Johnson’s issues could have gone unnoticed for months ? or that they could have been quietly filed under “bad attitude”. “I don’t know what they were supposed to do in that situation,” he says. “I’m not pointing fingers at anyone at City. Definitely not. Maybe there could have been another way for certain people to deal with things, but I can’t criticise anyone for not spotting a mental health issue.

“I didn’t speak to anyone about it until I was about 21. Then, one of the club doctors came up and asked me how I was feeling. First of all, I said, ‘Yeah, I’m alright’. But I wasn’t. I can’t quite remember how the conversation went, but I ended up saying I wasn’t feeling good. I explained that I felt like I had no motivation to get up, no motivation to do anything. I don’t think I even realised how bad I was until I spoke to him. He suggested I should talk to someone outside of football, outside the club.

“After that, I went off to speak to some guys ? doctors, psychologists. And that was the start of my journey towards feeling better. That was my road. That was my new journey, trying to understand the way I felt the way I did.”

How did it feel to talk about those issues he had bottled up for so long? “It was a relief in a lot of ways because I had never spoken to anybody before,” he says. “But at the same time, it’s hard understanding things about yourself and opening up and getting really deep into things. It was a relief, but it comes with that journey of unravelling things that maybe you didn’t want to unravel ? feelings about yourself.”

Growing up, when was he happiest? “Up to around the time I went to high school, things were great,” Johnson says. “I played in a team that my dad ran. We were called Charlton Juniors, named after Bobby Charlton. It was just a local team from Davyhulme and Urmston, but we had lads from all over the north west, as far as Morecambe and Blackpool.

“We went all over Europe. We were just a load of lads from the north west and we would go to play Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan, Juventus. My dad would call up Juventus and ask if he could speak to someone. Next thing we’d be flying over, playing a game against them. And we beat absolutely everyone. There were lads like James Jennings (now at Wrexham) and Anthony Pilkington (now at Wigan Athletic). It wasn’t like we were superstars, but we all played the Dutch way, the Johan Cruyff way, which is how my dad wanted us to play. We were all very technical and we ended up beating everybody.”

He is smiling as he says this. “Things were great,” he says. “We’d go on tour, have a right good laugh. Those were my carefree days. That was young Michael having fun, doing what I should do. But somewhere down the line, shyness crept in and my way of dealing with things changed.”

Johnson had an unconventional journey through the football academy system. He started with City and Everton , but at 12 he moved to Rotterdam intending to complete his education ? sporting and academic ? with Feyenoord. “We went over and played them when I was with Charlton Juniors and we gave them a hiding,” he says. “They asked afterwards, ‘Would he want to come and play?’ We talked about it. My dad was always one for thinking it would be a good opportunity ? different life experiences, different football experiences ? and we said yes.

“I was supposed to stay there until I was 16, living in Rotterdam, but I was there for a few months and I got homesick. I lived with Jonathan de Guzman, who was at Swansea and Napoli (and is now at Eintracht Frankfurt). We lived in a flat with this Brazilian woman, who was our carer. It was exciting in some ways, but then the novelty of being abroad wore off and I started missing whatever a 12-year-old kid would miss about home. I came home and told my parents I didn’t want to go back. And that was it. I didn’t go back.”

From there, he had spells at Liverpool and Crewe Alexandra before rejoining Everton, where he spent three years before returning to City at the age of 16 to begin his scholarship. Why did he move around so much? “That’s how it was,” he says. “I would go somewhere for six months, a year, then things would change a bit and I would go to a different team. My dad liked me to get different experiences football-wise.

“It wasn’t that unusual for lads to move around. A lot of the teams would chop and change a lot from one year to the next. They would bring in different lads or a different coach or start playing a different way. My dad always wanted me to play for technical teams, so I could improve that way rather than just lumping the ball forward. It was always about trying to find the best team and the best environment for me to develop.”

He lacked confidence, but he dismisses the suggestion that the academy environment, or indeed the moving around, might have been a factor. “I liked the structure of it,” he says. “I liked being told, ‘This is when we’re going to train. This is how we’re going to do it’.

“I honestly don’t think it was anything to with the football. It was a never specific thing. I just started feeling different around the time I went to high school. It’s different personalities. Some kids are confident. Some thrive. I didn’t have any confidence. A lot of kids struggle with feelings. You don’t know what feelings are when you’re a kid. You don’t know how to talk about them. Well, I couldn’t anyway.

“I dealt with it the only way I knew, which was to go into my shell and be all quiet. And those thoughts I was having sunk in, like, ‘You’re not like these lads here. You can’t talk to them. They’re funny, you’re not. They’re bigger than you, stronger than you’. I didn’t ever feel I was as good as the kid next to me.”

He enjoyed his time at Everton, working under the late Gary Ablett, “a great guy”. But they restructured their development teams just before he was due to sign scholarship forms at the age of 16, which left him concerned that he might not get much game time in the first year, hence the decision to return City.

There were aspects of his scholarship at City that he didn’t enjoy. “My personality was more shy and introverted, so I didn’t really like some things about the environment and all the jokes,” he says. “But I could deal with that. My problem was when I got home and all the thoughts in my head about not being good enough.”

But he was   good enough ? the outstanding prospect in a youth academy that included Micah Richards in the same year and Daniel Sturridge in the year below. “As a footballer, yes,” he says. “But as a person, I didn’t feel like that. I would look at everyone else and wonder why I couldn’t be the way they were. How have they got that confidence?”

Richards and Sturridge, in different ways, were extroverts, certain of themselves. But so were others, less talented, in his year. He looked around the dressing room and asked himself why everyone else seemed so confident. “I would just wonder, ‘How have they got that? How? How? How? That was one of my problems, not being happy in my own skin. I could never shake that.”

One of the new regime’s first acts at City, after buying the club in September 2008, was to secure Johnson’s services on a five-year contract. At the time, he was struggling with an abdominal and hip problem. He played in a League Cup tie at Brighton and Hove Albion the following week, aggravated the injury and missed the rest of the season. The longer he was out, the deeper his problems became.

Apart from one substitute appearance against West Ham United in September 2009 and another in a League Cup tie against Scunthorpe United a month later (when he gave a reminder of his forgotten talent with a spectacular strike from 25 yards), he never played for City again. As the money from Abu Dhabi changed the club beyond recognition, bringing superstars such as Robinho, Carlos Tevez and, later, David Silva and Sergio Aguero, he became a footnote. Over time, his motivation drained and his focus drifted.

“It was a period when I needed to understand why I was feeling so low about myself,” he says. “That then became my new goal, my motivation for getting up every day: to discover myself. And I don’t think being a professional footballer can go hand-in-hand with that. It didn’t for me, anyway. You need to be able to give it 100 per cent because you’re playing with a load of lads who are giving it 100 per cent and they’re really good. So even if you’re giving it 95 per cent, it’s hard to keep up. And I probably couldn’t even give it 75 per cent at that time. When you’re so low, it’s hard. I did want to try. I did. But there’s only so much of yourself to go around.”

Nobody at City seemed to believe in him anymore. They supported him, but increasingly it was out of duty rather than belief in the talent that had been so indulged during his teens. It came as a relief when he was offered a new start by the manager who had believed him in more than any other: Eriksson, who took him on loan to Leicester with ? sad to say ? predictably unfulfilling consequences. “That was probably a mistake,” the former England head coach says. “He didn’t perform as well as I thought. He wasn’t as he was before. Something had gone wrong.”

Johnson made nine appearances in all competitions for Leicester before the loan was cut short due to injury. “Sven is right,” he says. “My motivation had just gone.”

For City’s supporters, the spring of 2012, when they became champions of England for the first time in 44 years, was the best of times. For Johnson, who had been a rare source of inspiration at the time he first broke into the team under Pearce, it was another dark period, which he recalls with deep regret. Twice in the space of three months, he was caught drink-driving. He was fined a total of ￡5,500 and banned from driving for three years. “They were low times,” he says. “I was trying to escape my feelings by drinking, but I can’t condone that at all. I know it was dangerous and wrong.”

It was out of concern for his well-being that City did not terminate his contract at that point. It still had one year to run, but by now he was a City player in only the loosest sense. He got the hint in the summer of 2011 when his No 6 shirt was given to Joleon Lescott. When City beat Queens Park Rangers in such dramatic circumstances to win the Premier League title, he was eight miles away in Urmston, watching on television. “I felt happy for them,” he says. “There were a lot of people there that I liked, lads like Micah and Joe Hart that I’d been with from the start. I spent a lot of time with the physios, obviously, so I was pleased for them. There were a lot of people that I was really happy for.”

Was there ? is there ? a sense of what might have been? “Sometimes, because I got into professional football to play and to try to achieve things,” he says. “But when you’re feeling that low, it’s hard to get that motivation and that happiness from doing things. I didn’t have the happiness from doing those things, so when they won the league, it was more like, ‘Right, that’s great. I’m really pleased for them’. But I didn’t have time to sit and think about football when my motivation was about feeling better about myself. Rather than wishing I was playing football, I was wishing I was feeling better.”

Those drink-driving convictions were the catalyst for Johnson to throw himself into his recovery. In the summer of 2012, he checked into the Priory clinic to seek round-the-clock help. “It was a relief to go there,” he says. “I wanted to do it. I’d reached the stage where I needed an arm around me constantly rather than just going to see someone once a week and then being on your own for the rest of the week. I needed something more than that. I needed to be around people who were in the same boat. Because being at home and dealing with my issues on my own, I just felt trapped.

“I spent two weeks there. I don’t know what people’s perceptions of it are, but there were a lot of good people who had struggled with different issues. At first, I was thinking, ‘What if these people know who I am?’ But it was good for me. It’s good to speak to people who are feeling the same way you are. I spoke to the doctors every day.

“It was all about my self-esteem issues. I needed to try to understand that I can’t control what people think and people say. Before that, I was constantly worrying about what people thought of me. I would be going into the shops and thinking, ‘I hope that person doesn’t look at me. He can’t look at me or it’s going to make me feel bad’. I was trying to control the uncontrollable. Once you learn to stop trying to control the uncontrollable, life is a lot easier.”

In January 2013, more than three years after his last appearance for City, a picture appeared of Johnson on social media. He looked… “Dishevelled?” he says with a laugh.

Well, not  dishevelled , but his appearance certainly came as a shock to some of those City supporters who recalled him looking so lean when he was a teenager breaking into the team. Beyond that, there was the fact that the picture was taken in a kebab shop. It all added up to a certain image.

Little had been said or written about Johnson for months, but now the focus was on him once more. Journalists called up City to ask what was going on with him.

The reality was that he had already left the club a few months earlier: not “booted out”, as one report put it, but released from his contract by mutual consent. “Not long after I went to the Priory, I spoke with Brian Marwood at City,” he says. “He was always very good, Brian. He always tried to help me as much as he reasonably could. And it was best for me, for my recovery, if we parted company.

“It was a relief. I knew I couldn’t give my all in football. I needed to sort myself out. I knew I couldn’t do the two. I couldn’t be a professional footballer ? not a good professional anyway ? feeling the way I was feeling. It was the right time to leave. And once I left, I knew I could concentrate solely on sorting out my health.”

In late 2014, it emerged that Johnson was opening a bar and restaurant in West Didsbury, Manchester. “I really enjoyed that,” he says. “It was a great place. I had a business partner who ran the pub, but for me, it was about learning to run a business. And I enjoyed doing something away from football because, with me, I’d always been Mike the footballer. Everything was always about football, so it was nice to do something different.

“And more importantly, I met my wife Jen there. She lived nearby. We got married a couple of years ago and we’ve got a baby now. So something good came of it.

“Things work out. You might think that things could have ended up a different way, but ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’. Life doesn’t work like that. In life, you deal with stuff and you learn things about yourself all the time. I would say that now, the way I am, to have gone through some great highs and some great lows, I can look back and think it’s great that I’ve had all those life experiences.”

There was another venture as an estate agent. That was “something I was loosely involved with”, he says, but he is still a landlord with various properties. His main business interest these days is a car dealership with his father, trading in American cars. “Anything American, big engines, small engines, import, export,” he says. “My dad has done it for 30-odd years, on and off, but it has been really busy lately. Probably the busiest it has ever been I love it. I’m not there every day ? especially since the lockdown ? but I enjoy it.”

He seems really happy. “It’s amazing,” he says. “Once you sort yourself out, the problems that you were there, you realise they’re not problems. They’re just what you thought at the time. What I’ve learned is that an opinion about yourself isn’t a fact. If you change your opinion about yourself, the problem has gone away. It sounds simple.”

He also looks a lot healthier than he did in the kebab-shop picture. “I hadn’t done anything fitness-wise for about six months when that picture was taken,” he says. “The thing with me is that if I put weight on, it all goes to my face. But I can get rid of it quickly enough.”

Does he still worry about people looking at him or approaching him in public? “No, thankfully that went,” he says. “This what the therapy work does for you. You learn stuff about yourself, about wrong thinking. However long you took to develop those thoughts, you can unlearn them. It takes time ? and it has taken me time ? but I’m happy today with everything I’ve got.”

How do City supporters respond to him if they see him and about? Is it all about the goals against Derby and Villa? “Stuff like that, yeah,” he says. “You generally find with people, if you meet during them during the day, they’re great. Sometimes if you meet them at night after they’ve had a beer, they’re not so great, but that’s probably what alcohol does for you, isn’t it? Generally, people are great. I see people out and about. It’s been quite a long time now (since he was playing), depending on what relativity means.

“Everyone knows me around here. I was never interested in doing the footballer thing and moving out to Hale. That never bothered me. I’m an Urmston lad. My parents are nearby. My mates too. People around here don’t see me as Michael Johnson the footballer now. People see me as Mike.”

Over the past 11 months, Johnson has embraced another identity: as Isabelle’s dad. “I love it,” he says. “I don’t know if I’m becoming a bit more reflecting now, being a dad, but I’m glad I had those experiences when I did, rather than now. I wouldn’t have wanted to go through that when I was a dad. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to suppress things even more than I did and then, by doing that, pass some bad traits on to my kids. I had some really tough times, but I got some great things out of them.”

If Johnson, now 32, had been able to overcome his issues earlier and continue as a footballer, he might now be coming towards his retirement. Who is to say how many trophies or England caps he might have won or, more crudely, how much money he might have had in the bank?

Jim Cassell, City’s former academy director, says, “It’s a tragedy in my opinion that he isn’t still in the game. If he hadn’t had the injuries and the setbacks and one thing and another, he would have had a fantastic career for City and England.”

Hamann says, “Johnno could have achieved anything he wanted to achieve.”

But it just isn’t as simple as calling it a lack of desire. “Playing football didn’t make me happy,” Johnson says. “I thought it was going to, which is why I put all my energy into that. But it didn’t. And I’m not a materialistic guy. I don’t like all that. Probably because it draws attention to you. And I don’t want to people look at me, basically ? or I didn’t, anyway.

“If, somehow, I had carried on playing and I’d just about sort of coped ? wherever my career would have taken me ? I think around this time I would have ended up picking up this journey from where I was when I stopped playing at City. And that would have been really hard. It has been hard. Especially if I’d had a family around, I wouldn’t have wanted to have to go through that journey. I wouldn’t have wanted to hurt anyone or hurt my kids. I wasn’t stable at that time. I wouldn’t have been able to be a stable dad, going through that.”

There is far more in place these days from academy level upwards, but he knows better than most that the professional football environment is harsh. Some players struggle to deal with failure or rejection. Others struggle to deal with what comes with success and adulation. Then there are those who, after years thriving on the camaraderie, the routine and the all-expenses-paid comfort zone, find themselves lost when the floodlights fade and the dressing-room banter becomes a distant, forgotten murmur.

“I’ve spoken to lads who have had such a high from playing football and then they find it incredibly hard when they go back to the real world,” he says. “This is the real world. Football is a fake world. You get a lot of people telling you what you want to hear, patting you on the back when you’re doing well but then criticising when you’re not. It’s a multi-billion-pound industry, but it’s cut-throat. And once you go back into the real world, a lot of people don’t quite know how to deal with themselves. I say to them, ‘Well, football is only one part of your life ? one small part of your life ? and you can’t be defined by that’.”

What about if you had known then what you know now? “Mentally, I could play professional football now and be able to deal with the feelings,” he says. “I understand feelings now. Back then I didn’t understand what a feeling was. So, if I could put my 32-year-old mind with my 20-year-old body, then yeah. But not with my knee as it is. And life doesn’t work that way, does it? You learn about yourself. That question doesn’t exist in this world. In the fantasy world, yes, but not in the real world.

“Ultimately, I needed to sort my health out before football. At the end of the day, football is a job. Or it’s a game. But whatever it is, whether people love it or not, it’s a job. And when you’re feeling chronically low about yourself and you don’t know why, your goals change. My goals had to change because of the way they were making me feel. I stopped thinking about trying to be the best footballer I possibly could be. I started thinking, ‘Why am I feeling like this? How can I get better?’

“Football… I was made to play football. But my mind didn’t let me at that time. And if it was a choice between a) leaving football early and sorting myself out, as I have done, or b) carrying on with football but not sorting myself out, I would choose the first one all day long.”

Whatever you’re going through, you can call the  Samaritans  in the UK free any time, from any phone, on 116 123.

(Photos: Getty Images)