TV PUNDIT Merson: “Gambling addiction is a daily battle. My wife still checks my phone.”

EX-FOOTBALLER Paul Merson has spoken about his fight with gambling addiction saying: “It’s a constant battle every day.”

The former Arsenal and England player also told GB News how he believes his children won’t follow him down the same path.

And he said his wife now looks after all the money – because he can’t trust himself to be around it.

Speaking about his descent into addiction, which saw him blow millions, Merson. 54, told Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster: “You don’t have to put anything in you if you want to get high or get drunk, it’s already in you. With gambling I find it’s a constant battle every day.

“It gets better, of course it does, but I do have my days. It’s the fact I don’t have to put anything in me, it’s there already.

“It’s sad what happened but I was ill, and that’s the thing that I’ve come to understand. I’m an ill person trying to get well. I’m not a bad person or a weak person failing everyday of my life, I was an ill person who needed to get well very quickly.”

Merson said surrounding himself with a network of similar individuals has been instrumental in his journey.

“I need to be around recovering addicts, recovering alcoholics, gamblers and drug addicts,” he said. “They’re the people that understand me. If I talk to those people in recovery, they’re nodding. Nobody is ever there shaking their head thinking ‘Oh my God, what you really did that?’ or ‘you lost all that’ or ‘you did that’. It’s being around the right people.”

Merson, who starred in a BBC documentary last year titled ‘Paul Merson: Football, gambling and me’, also told GB News how he missed out on valuable time as a result of his addiction.

The 54-year-old said: “I lost a lot of money, don’t get me wrong, I lost a mindblowing amount of money but I also lost time. I’ll never get the time back. I can earn the money, but I can never earn back time. I can never earn back going to see the kids in plays at school and choosing to sit in pubs and betting shops instead.”

“My wife still now will pick up my phone and go through it on the off chance, because she still
hasn’t got that trust two years on because of what I did with the house deposit. I lost everything. She looks after the money. I have pocket money now, I’m 54 but that’s all I need. I can’t have money around me.”

Merson said he is confident that his recovery is setting a positive example – especially to his youngest son: “I’ve got older kids who have dabbled in the gambling and they’re ok, thank God. My little boy is seven, hopefully I’ve broken that cycle by jumping off that broken record. Him not being around gambling will hopefully be ok and that’ll be ok in the future for him.”

Former addict Daniel Fincham, appeared alongside Merson to explain how his new app, Recoverlution, is supporting those finding a way back from addiction.

He said: “We’re the world’s first technology platform dedicated to recovery from addiction. So we bring together content, community and wellness to unite the world of recovery and really shine a light on that world. As an addict I lived in fear and thought of what an addict was for most of my adult life. It was only when I got to recovery that I understood what it was, and when I got there I was overwhelmed by the community that’s there. There’s over 100 million recovering addicts in the world today, and yet there was no platform to unite them together.”