Thierry Henry has opened up on the Diary of a CEO podcast about how his early childhood experiences might have played a key role in transforming him into the star that he later became, but left him unequipped to deal with life outside of the sport.
Henry grew up in Les Ulis as a second-generation immigrant from the French overseas territories in the Caribbean. His family had left the Caribbean for mainland France to work and find the ‘French Dream’. There was an expectation within his parents that they had to work hard, they had to behave a certain way, as they could not let down their communities.
Despite being born in France, Henry was handed down those pressures that his parents had felt in moving to continental France through their expectations placed upon him. The former player and now current manager for the France under-21s spoke about how it was an experience of, ‘‘You need to fit in and not belong.’
It was not so much about belonging to the country or to the community that he grew up in but fitting in enough that you did not disrupt the demands that came with his family’s move.
Early Life in Les Ulis
Henry’s father left the family home when he was young. ‘My parents divorced when I was seven… eight… He was present when I had to go to training or games, or coming around at times.’ However, even when his parents were together, the striker ‘didn’t see a lot of love, affection, hugging… when I say that I’m not complaining, it wasn’t hell, but there wasn’t a lot of love.’
‘Even more so, when you grow up in this sort of neighbourhood it amplifies what’s happening at home. It’s more [an attitude of] be rough, anger, be the man… don’t cry.’ These sorts of attitudes were built within the striker from a young age, in a tough environment.
Henry describes where he grew up as a ‘normal neighbourhood… gangs, drugs, fights, happiness, diversity, different food, different religion.’ However, his footballing talent kept him away from the more violent elements within his hometown.
‘When you have a certain gift and the guys in the neighbourhood know that you might do something you are also protected. They [think] leave this one alone. He’s good at football. He might do something… an unwritten protection because you might do it.’
‘This baby will be an amazing football player.’
Henry’s complex relationship with his father is a focus throughout the interview. It is the fuel that drives him forward, and a dysfunction that the player has not quite come to terms with.
Even now the player has an uneasy relationship with this dual concept. On the one hand, Henry achieved everything he could have imagined as a player, but there is this gnawing worry that he has not developed beyond that.
From the moment that Henry was born, football was thrust upon him. The first time his father held him as a baby, he spoke words that have followed the striker throughout his glittering career: ‘This baby will be an amazing football player.’
It was not quite a prophecy, as the player explains. A prophecy is easy. It was always meant to happen. The words were quite something else for the baby.
‘After that you can imagine what comes next.’ Henry continues, ‘I was programmed to succeed… it was always a mission. I was on a mission to fulfil his dream to please him.’
This was no simple task. His father was not an easy man to please. Henry relates how when he was 15 he scored six goals in a victory, but on the drive back home with his father, there were no congratulations. Instead, he was admonished for all the things he had not done right.
‘The most difficult thing for me to do as a man and as a player… was to please my dad.’ Even as he won plaudits, trophies, the absolute admiration of the fans. At the back of his mind, ‘It was always what I didn’t do.’
Henry denotes, that the athlete had developed from this childhood ‘but the human being was missing.’
The First Steps at Clairefontaine
At 13, Henry left his familial home to join the prestigious Clairefontaine footballing academy. It was a place that fostered from the point of entry an intense sense of competition among those who would grow up around him.
The trials to get into the academy are notorious. Over four weekends, a crop of around 1000 young children from across the country attempt to impress their talent upon those watching. Each weekend, the best are invited back in an ever-decreasing number until there are only 23 kids left.
At the school, each player was competing for their future, and their friend’s futures provided a direct challenge to their own. There was no ‘normal young life… what you are exposed to right from the start is very difficult to deal with.’
It is only now that Henry has begun to process the extreme and often alien conditions that he had to experience in a precocious developmental era. He now looks at his children who have not grown up around the same pressures and sees something that he feels was lacking within him, that was never allowed to grow for him to become the athlete he later became.
‘My kids saved me. They are saving me every day. Every day I see something new. They are teaching me to be a dad.’ He clarifies, ‘Not a better dad than my dad, that’s not what I’m saying. But a better dad. And they’re opening doors that I did not know how to deal with.’
Henry finishes the thought, ‘I can see sometimes when they look at me how much they love me… if they only knew I look at them the same. Thanks for being here because it would have been tough.’
A star is formed not born
From Clairefontaine, Henry joined AS Monaco at the age of 17 and there the forward began a career where he became a legend of the game. A World Cup winner in 1998, and a title winner in France, England, and Spain. In particular, the invincible season with Arsenal and the Champions League win with Barcelona stand out always in memory.
‘When people see my path… they go “it was always going to be”, but it’s not true. I always had to battle. When you know the hardest thing I had to do was please my dad, the rest was nothing for me.’ Everything else that came in his career was ‘so easy compared to what I had to do in order to please the old man. And my young self is still waiting for that approval.’
However, the career of an athlete is a short affair and there comes a time when it finishes, and until this point Henry had been completely unprepared for what followed.
‘As an athlete as long as you stay within that frame you can feed whatever you need to feed to satisfy that other little thing that you had: your ego, avoiding your problems, because you prefer to be the athlete rather than the human being.’ As the athlete, ‘You know what to do.’
The Espoirs manager continues, ‘As an athlete, you die when you stop [playing]. The athlete, the competitor dies… People don’t teach you to die. So now you are going to face all your problems.’
‘To go back to the real world, it’s a shock to the system because you are not technically equipped to live in that world.’ From the age of five, Henry had been training for this career and by the time he was 37 it was over.
His entire identity until this point had been constructed to be a footballer and within a night it was gone. And all that he has put aside and pushed to the back of his mind in pursuit of this relentless goal returns unwillingly to the forefront.
His decision to stop playing was ‘easy.’ The player had spent the last ten years suffering from an Achilles problem and eventually reached a point where he could continue no longer. He summarised, that he could not ‘endure anymore.’
He explains, ‘I didn’t have a problem with stopping… but I didn’t know what would happen, what would come after.’ Continuing, ‘Now all I had was questions.’ There was no longer the routine of the professional game, there was no structure of seasons and matches to map out a calendar, and there was no direction as to what would happen next.
COVID Lockdown Provides an Opportunity for Growth
Henry looked after his retirement to become a manager to fill the void and escape the feeling deep inside. ‘You pass your badge… you try to do something to make sure that you’re not going to think about what has been chasing me for a very long time.’
What was chasing him finally found him during his time managing the Vancouver Whitecaps. It was here that there was a moment of pause for the first time in his life as the global pandemic hit in 2020.
COVID-19 left the manager isolated with his family back home in London, and the season stopped, he was stuck in Canada, alone and undistracted from himself. ‘Something like that had to happen to me for me to understand vulnerability, empathy, crying.’
The lockdown was an immensely difficult time for every one of us, and for Henry unable to see his children for a year, it opened up something inside him. He spent his days crying, an endless flood of emotions. His feelings so long pushed back had found a way to surface, ‘I couldn’t hide them. I couldn’t suppress them.’
Henry talks about how he was forced at this time to look inward and to consider and communicate with his inner child. It was a terrifying prospect for someone who self-admits that he was ill-equipped with the tools to deal with this conversation. ‘They tell you everything you didn’t want to hear… Be yourself. Be human. Show who you are. Stop fronting. Stop lying.’
A year after the pandemic began, Henry was able to return to see his children. And it sparked a moment that the former World Cup winner appeared to consider the most important in his life.
As his time visiting his girlfriend and his children was over, a return back to his working life awaited him. The forward placed down his bags to hug his children goodbye. He says, ‘Everyone starts to cry… From the nanny, to my girlfriend, to the kids… For the first time… they see me. Not the football player. Not the accolades.’
He quit Montreal on the spot. He could not bear the thought to leave his children, or escape a moment where ‘for the first time, I felt human.’
‘Throughout my career and since I was born I must have been in depression.’
Henry states in the interview that ‘throughout my career and since I was born I must have been in depression.’ Only now has man finally begun the process to heal and develop what for so long had been holding him back. He appears to recognise that it is a long pathway, but one that he is slowly walking.
Still, Henry admits that he looks for approval. Something he acknowledges is a strange situation for one of the best players to have ever played the game. Someone who won all there was to win. Someone who has a statue of him outside a stadium. Someone who will go down in history as an ‘invincible.’ But this was never the approval that he was looking for.
Our approval was given too easily and too willingly. It came naturally. It was an expression of what was normal. It was not the expression of a son looking to his father for something never given. It was not the approval of the human or the child behind the player, it was only ever for what the athlete had achieved.
GFFN | Nick Hartland
