"We'll roll our sleeves up," says Amber-Keegan Stobbs with perceptible grit. The Newcastle United Women captain is a whirlwind. She shifts through conversational gears at rapid pace in a glass-panelled meeting room at the club's Darsley Park training centre. How is the coffee? Is that water? I'm not sure I've ever drank a flat drink from a can before. I came to the old training ground as kid, actually - wasn't it in Durham? I'm sorry, what was the question again? "I've got a filing cabinet of a brain," she smiles, taking a breath. She doesn't live in the grey area. Not now, anyway.
Her story is not a linear one and she tells it, with depth and bravery, over six sittings. She is able, now, to recall without having to relive but there are still elements we have chosen to omit or temper slightly as she details the "little tremor" that existed within her. "I have been in positions in my life where I've been minutes away from not being here," she explains with gravity in one of many moving moments.
But she wears life a little lighter now. "Oh, yeah. But I think that's from taking everything too seriously for so long that I'm a bit of an oxymoron, maybe." She thinks people might see her as "a bit quirky", a bit "out there". Would that lightness have been obvious if we'd met six or seven years ago? "It would probably depend on what day or week it was. I was very good for a while at putting a mask on. I would be like this - but I didn't feel like this inside."
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Stobbs is 31 now. She grew up in London and her accent endures. "When I'm saying where I'm from, I'm just like, 'South Croydon'. But sometimes, I'm like, 'Surrey'. It depends. If I need to be streetwise, I'm like, 'South Croydon'," she grins. Her address, bizarrely, incorporated both locations.
Football pervaded their loving home. Her father, Kevin, hails from Newcastle. The tale of her name, borne of her dad's love of Keegan, is well-worn. Her mother, Carrie, worked at Crystal Palace and during school holidays Stobbs would often go in with her mum. "I used to hide under the desk when Steve Coppell or Simon Jordan would come into the office. I just got shy." Stephen Evans, a young Welsh defender, lived with the family for a while. Players would stop at their house to pick him up, among them Neil Ruddock. "He gave me my first Beanie Baby," adds Stobbs. It was a Doberman called Toby. Little details have always stuck in her mind.
She was a tiny child, slight of frame, playful and driven, and a bit of a tomboy; she wanted to dress like her older brother, Zale. At primary school, she was a "goody two-shoes" but there were early signs of anxiety. The idea of failing, whatever that looked like, terrified her. She cried through her SATs. "I remember doing a maths test in class. I had a scab from football on my leg. I picked it off so I could get out of the test... I just did it so I could go and hide in the toilet." She didn't know where that fear or pressure had come from.
From seven, when she attended a camp in the grounds of Selhurst Park, she knew she would become a footballer. Around that age, she went to her first funeral. Her grandad, nana and uncle all passed away in the space of two years and loss became normal. "I had this really warped vision of life," she says. Arsenal signed her at the age of nine and while with the Gunners, she attended a food workshop. It added another layer to her self-imposed need to be perfect. "I was obsessed. I wasn't under-eating, but I was obsessed with what I was eating," she says. "I can’t explain how obsessed I was. Everything - what I read, what I did. I went swimming at six in the morning before school."
At 14, in the school hall, Stobbs - dizzy, disorientated and overwhelmed - experienced what she later realised was her first panic attack. They would happen with semi-regularity; she remembers one on a matchday during a spell at Fulham which was sandwiched by her spells at Arsenal. Stobbs was in the same age bracket as Fran Kirby, then of Reading, and Drew Spence, who she'd played with for the Cottagers, and for a period she was held in similar esteem. She joined Chelsea at 15 and was soon training with the likes of Eni Aluko and Casey Stoney in their first team, making the bench at 16.
But that year, her brother was attacked and seriously injured. It happened the same night as her great nan passed away. Days later, a family friend was involved in a tragic accident. Her speech slows. "I was just like, 'this world is evil'," she says. "And I'm not strong enough for it." She began to feel "dead to the world", gripped by moments of heightened panic mixed and sickening lows. Other times, she felt nothing; total detachment. She didn't let on, shutting her bedroom door and masking her pain with what was, outwardly at least, normal teenage behaviour. "I didn't understand it. So why would anybody else understand it?" she says. "But also, I didn't like it about me. So why would anybody else like it?
"I should have realised a lot earlier that probably the most horrible place in the world was my head. Anybody else's external response to me would not have been half as horrible as what I would have battered myself for. It was the darkest, most self-destructive place. I wasn't negative about other people - I wasn't negative in the sense of, 'football's ****, this is ****, that's ****'. It was all, 'you're ****'. I looked at myself. How would anybody else accept me, or anybody else understand me? My self-talk was so bad."
In 2010, attracted by the possibility of making it as a professional Stateside, Stobbs accepted a scholarship to Hofstra University to play while studying Psychology, a subject that held her curiosity. She initially linked it to her own requirement for perfection; perhaps it would show her "how to have the best mindset and brain", she thought. Five years later, she came away with a first. "Maybe I was just made for it," she adds, wryly.
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As a freshman, Stobbs lived in Long Island, New York. Her parents flew out to see her play on her 18th birthday in October 2010. She landed on a sprinkler head mid-game and badly gashed her knee, ending her season. The American university lifestyle, the frat parties and team camaraderie, helped but a year later she broke her collarbone. She heard the crack but went into denial and spiralled in the five months of rehab. "It was just the darkest, deepest sadness," she says. "I got so negative, down, depressed. I wasn't eating because I didn’t feel hungry, but also because I was conscious of not exercising at all.
"I would cry every night for four or five hours, for, like, two-and-a-half months. I had a roommate and I would wait for her to go to sleep, and cry silently in the same room, and she didn't know."
She couldn't countenance anyone seeing her suffering. "I just thought, 'this is me, this is where I am - ******* hell, it's going to be a long life'. I got so depressed, I didn't feel anything," she says. "I'm just feeling an uncontrollable sadness. You know where you're just crying, but you're fully feeling it in your body? It's sad and devastating to say but it is like loss, right? Well I think I'd lost myself as well. I think I was grieving that. As well as all the other people, I just didn't exist. I didn't live in colour."
Memories of earlier traumas resurfaced and she felt as though she had no coping mechanisms. Stobbs refractured her collarbone a year later and was undereating; her weight dropped to just 47kg and her period stopped. "I'm not exercising," she thought, erroneously, "so I don't deserve the food." There were body image issues. "I couldn't walk past a mirror without checking my stomach. I'd go in my room and want to lift up my shirt and see if I felt fat, bloated, if you could see my abs. I would do that before anything that I ate or drank as well. I don't know how many times a day I would check."
Her coaches noticed she wasn't present but she was too firmly gripped by depression. Life as it was ached and hurt. "I do feel like I'm not making it to 30," she says, trying to describe her thoughts, almost in a whisper. "Don't worry - I know this is really terrible now, but it'll be over soon."
Voicing that jolts her. A single tear rolls down her cheek and lands on her top. She carries on as if she doesn’t want to acknowledge it. "That's sad. I look back and wish I had the care for myself that I do now. It saddens me that I hated myself that much.
"It's scary how out of control I was, and how people can get like that. It's happening all the time around us, but people just don't know how to get out of it. But this is the thing - I feel like I would be less sad about it if it was a year of my life, or a few months. We're talking six years before speaking to anyone."
After graduating with a first in Psychology and a Masters in Sport Science, Stobbs worked as a strength coach in Washington DC, where she lived with a host family for two summers while playing for Washington Spirit. Her dream of being a professional lingered but so too did fixations - on the skin callipers she would use at work, or working out before shifts, or the familiar spectre of failure. She remembers one particularly intense panic attack that felt like it lasted for an age on her bedroom floor. "When that passed, I just lied there crying for probably another, I can't tell you, it could have been three or four hours." She got up, splashed her face with water, "and ignored it."
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"It's happening," thought Stobbs in January 2016. She was back in England and, after speaking to six Women's Super League clubs, she signed for Reading. For a spell, she lived with England goalkeeper Mary Earps, now at Paris Saint-Germain. At 23 she was, finally, a professional footballer. "'Everything is going to go away'," she thought then. It was part of what she called her 'one day mentality' - the idea that one day, if she could just get to this place or achieve this goal or feel this way, everything would be fine. "I said I was going to be a pro footballer, and now I am one. So buzzing. I signed the contract, went out to the pitch, felt good, was buzzing after.
"And then that lasted… an hour. Two hours, maybe. And then I was like, 'that pass wasn't good enough'. 'That wasn't good enough'. 'What are they thinking, now you’ve signed?' 'You're here now - what can you do now?' And the present just went, straight away."
Her shelves were full of autobiographies and self-help books. She watched documentaries but anything that would give her a release, like a film or an engrossing box set, was avoided. She thought total immersion was the only way she could avoid sinking in her first crack at the WSL. There were practical difficulties as a low-paid professional ("do I fill my car with petrol, or do I do another food shop?") and, unsure of how to address her thoughts, paying for counselling or therapy was out of the question.
That summer, her family and friends suffered another loss. She felt acute grief and worry that those closest to her were suffering. Simultaneously, she hated that her dream didn't feel like one and, worse, she tortured herself for it, wracked with guilt that she wasn't enjoying life even having been confronted with its fragility. Football was no escape - Stobbs didn't feature much for the Royals, she was having panic attacks in training and she began to subconsciously associate her anguish with life in the WSL.
Through the PFA, she booked six therapy sessions. It was the first time she'd addressed her own feelings but she found herself playing them down. She didn't discuss the panic attacks, or depression, or the suicidal thoughts. She stopped after two sessions and in February 2017 she joined Everton, dropping down to WSL 2 and moving North for a fresh start. She would walk home over a bridge near her home in Widnes and stop and stand alone by the railings. Sometimes, she hoped she would slip.
One weekend, she travelled back to London to meet a friend, Tim Harper. She'd had a few more therapy sessions by then, on the NHS this time, and wondered if he might be receptive to talking. Tentatively, she typed out an email.
I want happiness and to live a life of less worry. I'd like to get back to 100 per cent with mental happiness.
Later, as she sat on a northbound train, her phone buzzed with a gentle, caring reply. "A-KS," reads Stobbs, "I had no idea you had struggled so much last year with depression and anxiety. Check this out - it might help." The email contained four articles, published in 2015, about someone who had been suffering with serious mental health difficulties. She clicked on one link after the other, the depth of the author's pain immediately obvious, pausing only when she clocked the byline on the final link. The articles were written by her friend.
In that carriage, she felt a slither of hope; for the first time she felt understood. "You're not alone in the world until you isolate yourself, and I had, to the absolute max," she says. "I'd moved away from everyone, I'd gone to Everton, I was living in a house by myself. Can you get any more isolated? But I had also not shared with anyone. It was an overwhelming feeling."
She had a year left on her contract but the Toffees were about to return to the WSL and the idea of the top flight felt suffocating. She wasn't ready to open up to her manager yet - she had broken down in front of him, and knew she would receive support, but couldn't bring herself to tell him. Her parents would visit for games and stay at her house and she really wanted to talk to them too; Stobbs would steel herself, pace back and forth on the landing before calling for them, then freeze and change the subject.
Instead, she wrote to them. She takes out her phone, searches for an email she sent to her mum, dad, brother and nan in April 2017, and begins to read it.
I just wanted to send an email because it'd be a longer-than-usual message on WhatsApp or your phone. I've thought about this for a while… Nothing too serious…
"I put a little ******* smiley face," she adds, rolling her eyes.
Over the last few years I've struggled with ups and downs… I've seen some therapists to chat about it and how I can improve my mental wellbeing… These ups and downs can come from anything - football, being bored, not being social, missing people, everything… Emotionally, I need to come to terms that football is just a game and doesn't define me.
I always managed to fake a smile and pretend I'm getting through… When I signed for Everton I thought it would all go away, but it's come back so I'm getting a new helper…
"In brackets, I put therapist - I couldn't actually say (it)," she says.
I met a new lady…
"I couldn't even call her my counsellor!"
I've also talked to the doctors about the depression and anxiety. It's not a severe case, but it does affect me a bit, so I'm having some help sorting that out too.
There is immense courage in her words. How did it feel, reading that? "I wish I could articulate then how I can now, for my family's sake. It's OK in here. But I was in a very, very dark place. This is toned down, loads. This email, I would write out and put away, write out then put away… it took me weeks to do this." Her family's response, their love and support, keenness to start open conversations and find the best support for her, was a "gamechanger"; she wished she had told them sooner. She always knew they would be there for her. "Unreal," she nods, her voice faltering. "They're amazing."
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Towards the end of her time at Everton, Stobbs visited a counsellor in Warrington and had cognitive behavioural therapy for the first time. Her next move was to West Ham, who sold her a vision - a five-year project with her as a leader and a job with the club's Foundation. It involved stepping down to the third tier, but she didn't mind. "I needed to get closer to home somehow," she says. "And it felt right."
Sharing had helped, but she was still learning to live a different way. She began studying to become a counsellor herself. She felt able to tell the Hammers' staff when she wasn't feeling good, which fostered a sense of comfort, but by 2018 they were about to join the WSL and old fears reemerged. Stobbs joined Charlton Athletic that summer but reached a crossroads at the end of the campaign.
"I'd done everything possible to feel OK. The only thing I hadn't done is stop playing football," she reasons. "I was like, 'maybe football is creating the stress for me'." Her final game, at 26, came at Selhurst Park, next to the car park where she first kicked a ball. "We had to write what we were playing in that game for on a Post-it note and put it by your peg. I'd been telling people I was retiring, but no-one believed it. My Post-it note said, 'to end my time in the game on a high'. I put it up, cried a bit, and was like, '****'."
Stobbs stopped playing in May 2019. She moved back home for the first time since she was 16, taking her two dogs, Mango and Hudson, with her, enveloped by her parents' love. She worked as a PA, an executive assistant and then an office manager at a finance firm, enjoying weeknight five-a-sides and a few pints after, discovering what it meant to have another identity. "And I actually kind of liked me outside of football," she adds, "just because I was like, free."
The itch returned after six months, though. She joined Palace and played for fun, using her free time and headspace to pass her level three counselling course in lockdown. She felt like she had come "full circle," Stobbs says airily. During her spell at Palace, she spoke publicly about her mental health for the first time in a club media interview, and discussed it on a podcast with Arsenal icon Tony Adams. There were still troughs but life began to make more sense and, unburdened by the weight of all she carried alone for so long, she continued her career at Watford and, later, Lewes.
In 2022, it was suggested by her counsellor that she underwent an assessment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She remembers studying the results, which came in a four-page document outlining patterns of disordered eating, detail-oriented information retention, patterns of OCD and restlessness. "I felt like I was reading a really sad book," she says. "And then it clicked - 'this is your life'." Her first formal diagnosis - save for once having noticed details of anxiety and depressive disorder on a doctor's computer - came at the age of 29, and cleared some of the fog. It came, too, with a realisation; she'd had it tougher than she realised. And she'd been tougher on herself than she realised. "No wonder you struggled," she thought.
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When Stobbs was seven, during a visit to the North East to see her grandparents, auntie and uncles, she visited St. James' Park for the first time and watched the Magpies beat Aston Villa 2-1. That was it for her. Newcastle United is her dad's club, her family's club, her club. She always hoped that, somehow, her road would lead here. After coming close to joining on a few occasions, she cried when she signed for United in July 2023. She cried when the news was announced. She is almost crying now. But these look like a different kind of tears. "I'm living the Stobbs' dream," she says. "It's not just for me." She wishes her grandparents and uncles were around to see her captain their club. "But I know, somewhere and somehow, that they know."
The concept of failure that pursued her for much of her life abated slightly when she joined the Magpies and skippered them to promotion in her first year. "Now I am where I want to be. And last year I was where I want to be, whether it was the Championship, WSL, tier two or three - it was for Newcastle, I don't care. But now we're in the Championship with Newcastle, I won't look back on my career and feel I've failed. I'm here, and this is exactly where I'm supposed to be, when I'm supposed to be here."
With an eye on the future, Stobbs is studying for her level four and five counselling qualifications with Reflections Counselling and Training in Jarrow ("one day, I'll be living a different dream"). She is an ambassador for If U Care Share, a charity which provide services critical to prevention, intervention and support of those bereaved by suicide. She has found purpose and passion, she says, in helping others.
"This would be the first time in my life that I'm experiencing actual calmness," she smiles. "And I'm not calm as a person - I'm just not, I'm energetic. But there's no pure underlying anxiety as I sit here." She still takes antidepressants, she explains, but exists differently now. She is not a passenger, she doesn't wear a mask, and "the waves have settled". "I've always had that little storm inside. The last time I felt like this I reckon I was about six, but I wouldn't be aware of it. I know I had trauma and fear of the world from seven onwards. I didn't really know what it was like to exist like this, with genuine calm and happiness - to enjoy existing."
Occasionally, Stobbs will head outside for a walk, barefoot, to embrace the feel of nature. "I'm not a hippy, by any means," she laughs, knowing that's the kind of thing people say before the word 'but'. "But… sunsets, the moon. I can literally stand, look at them, and feel like, 'oh my God - I'm in this world. It's amazing. I'm tiny in this world, so how big are my problems, and how big is life and everything everyone deals with?' We are actually in a beautiful place. I never had that. I used to see in grey, not in colour. But now - oh my God."
Is that what peace feels like? "Yeah. Peace with where I was at, how I got there. There's no longer any beating up or negativity about allowing myself to do that for so long in silence. That's my story and that was that, and now I just have to embrace it.
"I would have missed so many sunsets. I would have missed everything. But I make sure I stop and pause. Look at that. It's magic. It's class." How does that make you feel? She smiles. "Proper alive."
For more information about If U Care Share and the work they do, click here.
For more information about Be A Game Changer - Newcastle United Foundation's mental health awareness campaign - click here.
