Given the eventful nature of Troy Deeney’s professional career, it should not come as a surprise that his pathway into the game did not always follow the conventional route.
The 37-year-old hung up his boots in 2024, having made more than 700 professional appearances, with more than 200 goals to his name, via a spell in prison and a four-day spell on a ventilator during the COVID-19 pandemic.
During his time at Watford and Birmingham City, Deeney was one of English football’s most prolific strikers, but he admits that in his younger days he was a very different person.
Troy Deeney on his unconventional rise through the ranks
“God, you wouldn’t have been having this conversation with me, let’s put it that way!” he tells FourFourTwo. A lifelong Birmingham fan, he was expelled from school but could have joined rivals Aston Villa, had he turned up for all of the four-day trial.
“At 15, yeah,” he explains. “I was trying to be the cool kid. My mates were down at the local park playing football, a few of them smoked. I knew all of the birds were there and it was summer holidays, so I didn’t want to go to Villa. I knew on the last day of the trial that there was a match, so I turned up on the first day and the last day, that was it. My brother was already at Villa so it wouldn’t have been that bad playing for them – I didn’t have a Blues tattoo at that point! I just wasn’t in the right headspace for it.”
Deeney soon found himself playing for non-league Chelmsley Town. “I played central midfield at first, I loved a tackle, had loads of energy and enjoyed passing the ball, hitting big diagonals,” he adds. “I was 16 playing with lads who were 34, so I instantly knew how to look after myself and learned the dark arts – the pulling of the shirt, things like that.
“I loved my time at Chelmsley, it shaped who I am. If I’d gone straight from getting kicked out of school to joining Walsall, I would have struggled, but at Chelmsley Town there were so many different ethnicities and ages. Some had families, some were going out straight after games, some were turning up drunk to games…”
The latter group included Deeney himself – Walsall spotted him on a day when he reportedly scored seven goals in a game while intoxicated. “I can’t tell you if I actually scored seven, but I was definitely drunk!” he laughs.
“I was 18 – my job on a construction site finished on the Friday, I got my last pay packet, paid my mum what she needed, then I went out, had a few too many with the lads, then played on the Saturday and Sunday. I went out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday – then I’d figure out getting another job on the Monday.”
So what was it like to be playing while drunk? “It was normal, that was the problem, we were doing it quite a lot!” he says. “At 18 you don’t get hangovers, you go again. I grew up in a community where when you’re drunk, you have one more to level yourself. So I had a Jack Daniel’s before the game and was good to go.
“Walsall just happened to come to the game. Mick Halsall – a legend, I’ll always give him the credit – saw something in me that I didn’t think was possible. He gave me not only an opportunity, but a lifeline, and thought, ‘Do you know what? If I push this kid…’ I didn’t realise how much of a listener and a learner I was – he was just trying to punch things in all the time, ‘Do this, do that’.”
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