by Draw a square. That was all Dominic Matteo had to do. However, when pencil met paper to complete the seemingly simple task, Matteo created a circle.
His therapists repeated the instructions. His wife, Jess, left him with love. She drew another round shape. “I just couldn’t do it,” Matteo says. “He was embarrassed. He was so frustrated. He was really struggling at that moment. It was so strange.”
Faced with that adversity, having to learn to read, write and speak again, Matteo turned to “self-discipline” and “structure” that earned him 276 Premier League appearances with Liverpool, Leeds and Blackburn.
“You have to really focus on what’s in front of you: ‘Okay, Dom, what can I do to improve my way of life?’ And that was doing the hard yards again. It was like being a young footballer: relearning this, relearning that. It was horrible, difficult and frustrating. But I think my sport (and I’m lucky to have it) has helped me get ahead.”
Matteo is sitting with Jess reflecting on his recovery from November 2019 surgery for a cancerous brain tumor. The day their lives changed forever began relatively calmly. Matteo had experienced a headache here, a bout of discomfort there, but it was all easily attributable to other sources.
His GP had referred him for an MRI. It was scheduled to follow a trip to Singapore with Liverpool Legends, but a cancellation opened up a pre-flight slot. He drove himself to the hospital. Jess headed to the dance school he runs.
Matteo the footballer had many scans. “Usually they take a while, but it seemed like a minute to me,” he says. “They must have seen something right away.” That Monday night he was not allowed to leave the hospital. On Wednesday he was in a wheelchair, with blurred vision and a distorted face.
Jess picks up the story here; Matteo remembers little of her. With the surgery scheduled for Friday, she took her parents home. But Matteo had a seizure and Jess vividly remembers the call from the hospital: “They said, ‘We’re doing everything we can, but you have to get there as quickly as possible.’” Jess’s voice breaks. Matteo takes her hand tenderly. They dated briefly during their days in Leeds, separated, married other couples, before reuniting after a chance meeting. “My only thought was, ‘Make sure he knows you’re there before he leaves.’”
Fortunately, Matteo was stabilized and underwent surgery. Jess rejected an entire prognosis: “I didn’t want to put an expiration date on my husband.” After 10 tortuous hours, the surgeon, Ryan Matthews, emerged to give him “the most wonderful news”: he had removed between 90 and 95% of Matteo’s tumor; a tumor that had lain dormant in Matteo’s skull since childhood, partly calcifying and transforming into an anaplastic ependymoma. “I basically played my entire career with a brain tumor. I could have been a decent player without it!” Matteo jokes. Jess rolls her eyes and playfully smacks his leg.
Surgery and subsequent radiotherapy were the first steps in Matteo’s rehabilitation. The therapy took place twice a day and Matteo was enveloped in the warm embrace of football. Liverpool prevented the publication of a sensational article about his condition, and former teammates and coaches formed a revolving door of visitors. Eddie Gray, David O’Leary, Steve McManaman. Robbie Fowler and Neil Ruddock were regular FaceTime customers.
Matteo is visibly humbled by the love he has been shown: the football community, Jess, his best friends Jason and Shorty, who would sneak fast food into his neurology ward at night. Matteo believes those interactions created the electricity that made his brain dance again.
On day trips home, Jess would film him doing simple household tasks, like making tea. “Find the cup. He finds the spoon. The things we do without thinking were huge for him,” she says.
Therapists took him to supermarkets to practice buying a meal. “I still don’t quite understand it,” says Matteo, laughing. “Now a meal deal costs me around £50! It’s all that kind of stuff. I’m thinking, ‘Why can’t I do this?’
Ultimately, the hospital deemed discharge safe. That day, according to Jess, Matteo, who scored for Leeds at the infamously hostile San Siro, “looked scared. “That really worried me: I didn’t want Dom to be afraid in the real world.”
Matteo admits that “he wasn’t used to asking people for help,” but now he defends it firmly. His initial anxiety has been eroded by the “confidence I get from doing small tasks.”
And now? “The difference is night and day. I am always aware: I never want to get ahead of myself. I cannot afford to become complacent. But yeah, I live in the moment and I have some good days.”
Life in the family (their son Luca lives with them and Matteo’s daughters from a previous marriage are nearby) will always be different. He will never be able to drive again. Each day starts with at least a dozen tablets. Reading even a few sentences exhausts you.
Scans (and the “scan anxiety” that accompanies them) are done every six months. “A stable scan result is the best we can ask for,” says Jess. “That means the remaining tumor is doing well.”
Despite this, the Matteos continue forward. He is back to being a pundit and is often the match day speaker at Leeds. And together they give motivational talks. It happened by accident, because Jess initially had to do some of Matteo’s explanations for him. But receiving positive feedback about his candid accounts of life events inspired them to continue.
In addition to Matteo’s cancer, the couple talks about the dark days years ago, when he would go away after drinking all night. “Suddenly it’s four in the morning the next day,” she begins.
Jess chimes in: “It’s Tuesday; let’s not sugarcoat it, Dom.” Mateo agrees. Was it loneliness? “You’re alone,” he says. “But at that moment you don’t know that you feel alone. There are many aspects to that. “You don’t know how many addictions you have.”
After an injury limited his Stoke career, compulsive betting sunk Matteo to the bottom.
“It’s an epidemic in football,” he says of the game. “I think. I don’t know – I can just say it; I can smell it. I know it’s happening. You may have lost 100 grand, 50 grand, but you can hide it. In your head you’re thinking, ‘Shit, what? What have I done?’ “But you can still mask it. The money increases and before you know it, you’re on the chase. And the chase, in a way, is what we all liked.”
Matteo takes a deep breath. “I didn’t realize the destruction I was creating. You are pushing self-destruction, but you are destroying everyone else. I realize that now. They are the errors. Jess had to live with that. My friends and family had to live with it. But as a person you are very good at masking things like that.”
Jess is open about how close they came to divorce. She believes her career as a professional dancer gave her insight into the addictive tendencies of high-performance athletes. That’s what saved them: “I think I understood it a little bit, not a lot,” she says. “Not much, because she took it to the absolute extreme. But I heard it. I heard it. While in many marriages the spouse cannot hear. They think he’s outrageous. There is no understanding in it.”
The square is easier for Matteo now. However, the shape of life remains unpredictable.
