Álvaro Morata (Madrid, 31 years old) returns to the Spanish team after winning the Euro Cup last summer. Before starting these two games with Spain, the forward gave an interview to the Cope network in which he opened up about the depression he suffered several months ago. “When I tied my boots I wanted to go home,” he confessed. “Three months before the European Championship I was seeing if I could play a game again. Sometimes what you like most in the world is what you hate the most,” says the footballer. “Very few people know me. People think I’m different, but I’m still a joker and a hard worker. Only my family, my friends know me…”
The former Real Madrid, Juventus, Chelsea and Atlético de Madrid player says that he asked for help when he was on his way to training and felt that “something was wrong.” “I would go to the locker room and stay silent in my place. Then I would lock myself in the room and fight with my head,” Morata confesses. “I have been medicated, in the end all this is an illness like any other.”
The man from Madrid has assured that he lived through very hard times and that he was “embarrassed” to be with his children, after having experienced difficult situations every time he went out with them on the street. “Every time I went out I always had some episode, sometimes without maliciousness, with people about something that had happened in previous games. And, in the end, they didn’t want to go shopping either. There came a time when they said so many things to me in front of my children that I was ashamed to be with them. I was trying to explain the situation to them,” he said.
The captain of the national team left for Italy this summer after signing for Milan and has opened up about his departure from Spain. “When you have really hard moments, depression and panic attacks, it doesn’t matter what job you do, what situation you have in life. You have another person inside that you have to fight against every day and every night. For me the best thing was to leave Spain. There came a time when I couldn’t stand it.”
Alberto Estevez (EFE)
However, the captain of Spain confesses that winning the Euro Cup last summer has helped him a lot. The forward says that he is respected more. “It’s a sword that was stuck in his chest.” To get rid of that nervousness and uncertainty the night before the final, Morata went to Grimaldo’s room with Baena and Cucurella, who were with a hairdresser. “I sat with them to hang out, the hairdresser gave me blonde bangs (…) in the end my teammates helped me think only of positive things,” explains the forward.
Morata has not been the only one
Although it may be surprising that an elite athlete talks about depression as a life experience, there have been others who also did so at the time. One of them was Andrés Iniesta, who this week announced his retirement from football. The man from La Mancha also experienced this process in 2009 and it continued until the following year, when Spain won the World Cup, precisely with his unforgettable goal against the Netherlands. The continuous injuries or the death of his friend Dani Jarque plunged the former Barcelona player into depression.
One of the leaders in the fight against this taboo was the gymnast Simone Biles. The American left the final of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games arguing that she was suffering from depression and anxiety attacks. This summer he competed again at the Paris Games, where he won three gold medals and one silver.
One of the last athletes to announce that he was suffering from depression was Ricky Rubio. The Spanish basketball player took a break in August 2023 and returned to Spain at the beginning of this year. “When I left basketball I felt like the most cowardly person in the world, but with hindsight I think I was very brave,” he confessed.
As Morata and other athletes who have brought their episodes to light say in his interview, he does not want to cause shame with his experiences, but rather to “help people in this process” that can be so complicated.
