Former Liverpool FC and current Celtic Manager Brendan Rodgers revealed that the pressure of the Anfield job led to a situation where he felt he was having a heart attack, once his tenure at the club was over.
Rodgers made an extremely personal revelation that serves as an alarming cautionary tale to us all about just how much stress managers at the highest level of football endure.
In an interview with the BBC, the Northern Irishman told a story about when he was taken ill and feared the worst while vacationing in Dubai just a fortnight after Liverpool sacked him. The 44-year-old felt that he was going into cardiac arrest, which took the life of his mother Christina when she was just 53.
“There was an incident when I left Liverpool and I went to Dubai a fortnight later,” said Rodgers.
“I lay in fear one day thinking I was having a heart attack – maybe my mum’s condition affected me because she died of one.
“I was rushed to hospital and basically it was a reaction my body and chest was having in starting to condition itself in terms of not having that pressure.”
Rodgers said the scare really opened his eyes, not just to how much pressure was had been under, but also how he should go about dealing with such stressors in the future.
“That made me sit up and ask myself how do you manage pressure, how to regulate it,” Brendan Rodgers continued.
“I needed to go and address it. I didn’t I think at the time [of managing Liverpool] there was any more or less pressure because you are so ingrained in it.”
Rodgers led Celtic to a treble last season, and came very close to guiding Liverpool to their first Premier League title since 1991 when he guided the Reds to a runner-up season in 2013-14. In the BBC interview Brendan Rodgers takes a step back and expresses some perspective on life. His father died at the age of 59 from cancer.
Rodgers reflected on the time he took away from football while he was in between jobs.
“I felt during that seven-month period [break he took] I needed to reflect and then make sure in my next job that I could learn from the experience.
“You have got to have your health, happiness and energy back in order to succeed.”
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, which is partnered with News Now and Minute Media. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes regularly to WGN CLTV and Chicago Now.
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