‘Football helped me get my mental health straight’ – Sam Evans

Within 10 weeks Evans had gone from being a stockroom assistant in a department store to one of the most recognised faces in the UK.

“It was crazy, I got a feel of what it’s like to be a famous person,” he said.

“Nights out were ‘wow!’, people constantly wanting to talk to you, wanting a photograph.

“You can’t get a moment for yourself. When you’re walking along the street, in a shop or the garage, people came up to you.

“Then you get an email from a television production company asking you to do this or that, interviews, and other things.

“You’re doing something new every day, travelling all over the UK doing different things and then, after a year or so, I started to notice that emails were coming in less and less.

“People don’t come up to you as much. They recognise you but they don’t make so much of a fuss.

“After Big Brother when the celebrity aftermath started to wear off, it felt like nothing was good enough anymore.

“It felt like nothing could compare to the experience I had just gone through in the house and outside.

“I also felt that I was being judged or being compared to reality stars who continued to have popular tv work and I was questioned why I wasn’t on that show etc.

“I felt I was expected to have a rich and luxurious lifestyle, when the reality was that I had to go back to work.

“That’s when I… started focusing on football more, with Wales Futsal and Great Britain Deaf. When I played football again it made me realise again who my true friends were, and it made me open my eyes up about who’s real or not.

“Football made me forget about the difficulties that I was going through, it helped me get my fitness back on track and get my mental health straight.”

Over the last 15 months, Evans has been on another journey when the Wales Deaf Football Association (WDFA) fielded an 11-a-side team for the first time since the late 1990s – and he was selected.

The quality of players the WDFA was able to recruit prompted them to enter the Wales squad into the EuroDeaf Championships, where Evans will captain them.

“It’s a massive achievement for me to be the captain of Wales. It’s a reminder of how far I’ve come after everything I’ve been through,” he said.

“We’re going to give it 110%, I think that’s just the Welsh blood in us, we’re very passionate.

“We’re a very close-knit team, we’re like a family and I believe that will help us tremendously when we go to Turkey.”