<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Former\u00a0England\u00a0and\u00a0Manchester United\u00a0striker\u00a0Wayne Rooney\u00a0said he was not prepared for the pressure that accompanied his rise to elite-level football as a teenager, and he turned to drink to cope with his problems.<\/p>\n
Derby County manager Rooney began his playing career with boyhood club\u00a0Everton, scoring his first Premier League goal in spectacular fashion as a 16-year-old against\u00a0Arsenal\u00a0in 2002.<\/p>\n
He then joined United and became one of the country\u2019s most iconic players, scoring 253 goals for the Old Trafford team and winning five league titles and the Champions League.<\/p>\n
Rooney, 36, who became England\u2019s men\u2019s record goal scorer with 53 and most capped outfield player with 120 international appearances, said he struggled to deal with fame after growing up on a Liverpool council estate.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo go from that to having to deal with becoming a Premier League player at 16 and an international player was something I wasn\u2019t prepared for,\u201d Rooney told the\u00a0Daily Mail\u00a0before the launch of an Amazon Prime documentary about his life.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had never even thought about the other side of being a football player. I wasn\u2019t prepared for that part of life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt took a long time for me to get used to that and figure out how to deal with it. It was like being thrown in somewhere where you are just not comfortable. That was tough for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rooney said his problems with drinking continued until his first son, Kai, was born in 2009.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were times you would get a couple of days off from football and I would actually lock myself away and just drink, to try to take all that away from my mind,\u201d Rooney said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople might know that I liked a drink at times or went out but there was a lot more to it than just that. It was what was going on in my head.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was just a build-up of everything \u2026 pressure of playing for your country, for United, some of the stuff which came out in the newspapers about my personal life, just trying to deal with all that pressure which builds up.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n \n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Former\u00a0England\u00a0and\u00a0Manchester United\u00a0striker\u00a0Wayne Rooney\u00a0said he was not prepared for the pressure that accompanied his rise to elite-level football as a teenager, and he turned to drink to cope with his problems. Derby County manager Rooney began his playing career with boyhood club\u00a0Everton, scoring his first Premier League goal in spectacular fashion as a 16-year-old against\u00a0Arsenal\u00a0in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":981349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[4518,4519,1265,4520],"class_list":["post-981348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-cope","tag-drank","tag-pressure","tag-rooney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=981348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=981348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=981348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=981348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}