‘I am The Secret Footballer’ – Dave Kitson ends football’s longest guessing game

By Tabish Ali

For years, football fans played detective.

Every new “Secret Footballer” column dropped like a clue. The voice was too inside to be a journalist. Too sharp to be a club statement. Too honest to be anyone with a contract still to protect.

Now the guessing is over.

Speaking to Champions Speakers Agency, Dave Kitson has confirmed he was the man behind The Secret Footballer, the anonymous Guardian column and book series that pulled the curtain back on the modern game.

Kitson’s reveal is disarmingly simple. “I am the secret footballer,” he says. “I’ve never said that out loud before.”

The confession lands because it does more than scratch a long-running itch. It drags fans back to a different football era, when an anonymous voice could still move the conversation.

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Why he hid

Kitson is clear on why anonymity mattered. He says the project was never about “naming names”. It was about describing how the industry works, and why it works that way, then letting readers “pick through” it and form their own views.

He also says the risk was real. While he was still playing, being outed would have ended more than a column. “I had a football career. I had a big contract and if I had been outed I would have been sacked on the spot and ostracised from the game,” he says.

That fear, he admits, turned the whole thing into a pressure cooker. What started as a release became “a huge amount of anxiety”.

The real reason he started writing

Kitson frames it as something closer to survival than a side project.

He says the idea came in a period when he “wasn’t happy with where football was going”, and he needed an outlet “for my own mental health”. Writing, he says, was “cathartic.” It helped him process things he felt “didn’t make any sense”.

That detail matters because it shifts how the Secret Footballer is remembered.

Fans often treated it like football’s version of an anonymous whistleblower, a source of scandal. Kitson’s version is less glamorous and more human – a player trying to make sense of his workplace, and doing it in the only way he trusted.

It also makes the ending of the project feel inevitable.

The moment it stopped being “fun”

Kitson pinpoints one weekend in 2011.

He says he wrote a Guardian column about mental health titled Sometimes There’s Darkness Behind the Light, at a time when, in his words, “nobody talked about mental health in football.” He describes the culture bluntly as speak up, and you do not play. You are seen as weak.

Kitson now works as a mental resilience speaker, represented by Champions Speakers Agency.

In the piece, he says he warned of a “mental health epidemic” in football and predicted it would only be a matter of time before someone took their own life.

He submitted it on the Friday. It ran on the Saturday. On the Sunday, former Wales manager Gary Speed was found dead.

Kitson describes what followed as “credibility in the worst possible way.” The column stopped being a cult read and became something heavier. He says he lived with guilt, then anger at how slowly football’s authorities reacted, before he eventually “just stopped” and disappeared from writing.

What fans should take from the reveal

The reveal will be fun for supporters who spent years arguing over the identity in pubs, group chats and forums.

But Kitson’s account leaves a sharper takeaway: football’s honesty often depended on someone risking everything to tell the truth anonymously.

He makes that point himself, almost in passing. “Everybody’s got a podcast now,” he says. You cannot stop people talking about football anymore. The difference, to him, is that back then the columns and books felt “genuinely new”.

That is the strange legacy of The Secret Footballer. It was never just gossip. Kitson believes it helped trigger “overhauls at the highest levels.”

Whether fans agree or not, the impact is hard to ignore: it changed the tone of how football spoke about itself, long before clubs learned to do it in controlled media slots.

Why it matters to non-league, too

Kitson’s story does not end at the Premier League.

He started in non-league and, after retirement, he has moved back towards the grassroots end of the game. He is currently managing Maidenhead United Women, with the club describing his appointment as immediate ahead of the 2025–26 season.

That matters for non-league supporters because Kitson’s view of football is not built only from top-flight dressing rooms. It comes from the full ladder: the lower-league grind, the jump, the contracts, the pressure, and then the return to football that looks more like a community than a business.

It also frames his anonymity in a different light. The Secret Footballer was not a player trying to become famous from behind a mask. Kitson says it was someone trying to stay afloat, while telling a truth the industry was not ready to hear.

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