Former Spurs defender admits to being depressed during his time in North London

Former Tottenham defender DeAndre Yedlin has admitted to being depressed in the first few months after he completed his move to the North London outfit.

The Newcastle United star was one of Tottenham’s first signings of the Mauricio Pochettino era, arriving at the club in the summer of 2014 from MLS side Seattle Sounders in a deal worth £5million (Chronicle).

He remained with the Sounders until the end of the year before linking up with Spurs at the start of 2015.

There was some excitement among the Tottenham fan base with Yedlin’s arrival as he had shown in the MLS that he had blistering pace and could get up and down the flank all game.

However, the defender hardly got a look in at Spurs before being loaned out to Sunderland the following season and was finally sold to Newcastle in the summer of 2016.

The defender has gone on to have a successful career with the Magpies, having made more than a hundred appearances in the famous black and white (transfermarkt).

The 26-year-old has now opened up on how difficult he found it initially after completing his move to North London.

Speaking to ESPN, Yedlin said: “It was actually quite tough for me in the beginning. There were times when I was like ‘this is too much,’ the jump from MLS to here in all aspects of it, not just the football aspect.

“I remember being in my apartment thinking like, ‘I can’t do this, I want to go back.’

“That just goes to show that money is not everything because I was much happier making whatever I was making at MLS – which was much less than what I was making at Tottenham – but because life wasn’t giving me what I needed, I was depressed. It was a very tough first six months for me.”

Spurs Web Opinion

Fans sometimes tend to think of professional footballers as robots and forget that these are young men who are as susceptible to self-doubt and depression as the rest of us. In fact, very few people in the history of the world have had to deal with the level of scrutiny that celebrities do these days in the age of social media. That is why I believe it is never productive to criticise players on social media after they’ve had a bad game.

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