RIO FERDINAND has confessed he and wife Kate have full-blown rows — and most of the time he is to blame.
Though the former no-nonsense Manchester United and England footballer thanks Towie’s Kate for his reinvention, teaching him how to talk about his problems.
The 44-year-old’s told of his troubles in the podcast Football Ramble, broadcast this week to mark the launch of his new three-part TV documentary series Tipping Point.
He shared on it: “My missus will tell me a problem that she’s got going on, and I talk about it from my point of view.
“Most men are like this, we try to help them solve the problem. And she’s going ‘I don’t want you to try and solve it’.
“And I end up having arguments with her. We only argue about stuff like this. We get into a full-blast row because you’re trying to solve it.
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“She says, ‘I don’t want you to solve my problem for me. I just want to be able to vent, and you listen, and just help me that way’.
“As a man you’re sitting there going ‘Well why are you telling me then if it can’t be solved? Just solve it’.
“Men feel ‘don’t discuss it if you’re not trying to make a solution’.
“What’s the point in discussing it if there’s no solution-based foundations of why you’re making that conversation’, which is probably the wrong way to look at it.”
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Rio has become concerned about mental health in football, especially among young players.
While playing for Queen’s Park Rangers in West London he would drive to training with team-mate Bobby Zamora.
But Rio refused to confide to fellow players that his first wife Rebecca Ellison was dying with breast cancer.
She passed away, aged 34, in May 2015, leaving him to look after their three children Lorenz, Tate and Tia, then aged nine, six and four respectively.
Two years later he started dating Kate, now 31. They married in Turkey in 2019.
But Rio said he has become a better communicator since meeting Kate, with whom he has a 23-month-old son Cree.
He said: “I think that’s an important factor in feeling good, when you communicate how you feel to someone else or people around you that you care about.
“It’s since I met my missus. I was never really a good communicator before that.
“Then I met Kate. She’s really good and has got really open lines of communication, and she’s pushed me into that way of thinking.”
Talking about why he did not tell his team-mate about Rebecca’s condition, Rio said: “A big part of my make-up as a football player was you don’t show emotion, you don’t show weakness, especially.
“If you’re going to show any type of emotion, weakness isn’t the one you show.”
Rio continued: “Young men in our generation, we were definitely brought up to have a stone face and a hard exterior. If you did have those feelings of vulnerability or emotions you better make sure you quash them quickly.
“I very much became that, quite hardened. I had no real empathy for some people when they had issues. I wasn’t where I am today.
“I saw people come into the dressing room who, when I look back now and I think about it, they were going through a tough time.
“I didn’t even have any time in my headspace to even think about addressing that because I thought they were a negative impact on our team’s quest to try and win.
“And it was such a backwards way of looking at it.
“If you’d looked and taken an interest and spoken to those people and paid a bit more attention to those things you might have been able to help those people get back on track and then become a positive impact on your team’s chances of winning.
“Mental health wasn’t even part of any sentence.
“I remember Carlos Queiroz, Manchester United’s Portuguese former assistant manager, and his approach to training was very different to us English lads.
“We were 100 miles an hour in training every day and he used to just chill in training. Come a game, he was an animal.
“I remember one day, as we walked out to training, he was actually laying face down on the bed getting a massage.
“I went to the coach ‘What’s going on with Carlos, what’s he doing having a massage, he’s not injured?’
“He said ‘No, he’s not injured, he’s just had a baby and he’s a bit tired, a bit drained’.
“Looking back now, mentally and physically, that was the right way to approach it.
Once you open up about how you’re feeling from your mental standpoint, how light you feel after you’ve had that conversation, you can’t put into words.
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“Whereas us English guys would just bat on, got to be hard, got to get through this, and we all kind of laughed at Carlos about that.
“We were like ‘this is a joke’, with disbelief really, ‘we’ve all had kids mate. Jesus, what makes you special?’
“Everyone’s case is very individual, everyone deals with things very differently.
“My previous wife was passing away and the fella I went to training with every day in the same car, Bobby Zamora, didn’t know for a long time.
“My team-mates, that I shared a dressing room with, didn’t know.
“That’s football, that’s a place where I go to work and no one needs to hear that. No one needs to be a part of that.
“I can deal with this outside. I don’t want to put any more strain and pressure on those guys, they’ve got enough pressure to win a football match. So I didn’t really feel it was a place to do it.
“You don’t want to put an extra burden on anyone else’s shoulders when they’ve got enough going on in their life.
“With situations like that, with hindsight, you think people would actually embrace that more.
“They’d want to help you, they’d want to open their arms and give you a cuddle and bring you in and have a coffee together and just discuss how you’re feeling and help you along the way.”
The angry Rio is a long way from his apparently perfect family depicted on social media.
This week the couple were photographed outside Windsor Castle, where the once England centre back received his OBE from Prince William.
Kate gushed: “I am so proud. An inspiration to us all, my husband. I love you.”
Tipping Point covers racism in football and sexuality and mental health in soccer academies.
The ex-player believes many professional footballers struggle when they retire.
He said: “I’d get up every day at 7.30, sort the kids out, drop them to nursery, go to training, get home by two o’clock. Routine, routine. All of a sudden that disappears.
“You start seeing your missus another six, seven hours a day, ‘hold on, this is someone I don’t even know, didn’t know she was like this, didn’t know she had these habits’.”
Rio now urges people to open up if they’re suffering mentally.
He said: “One bit of advice I’d always give to people in workplaces, in schools or at home, is every now and again to just ask someone ‘How you doing?’ — not once, twice.
“Because normally people can get away with going ‘I’m all right, I’m all right’.
“And you go ‘Really, is everything all right for real?’.
With that second one you might get a different answer and then a conversation could start that might help that person.
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“Once you open up about how you’re feeling from your mental standpoint, how light you feel after you’ve had that conversation, you can’t put into words.
“It’s just a beautiful feeling.”
Source: Soccer - thesun.co.uk
