‘I never thought I needed therapy,” says Michail Antonio during a long conversation about the darker side of football, trauma and where it went wrong for West Ham. “I was always a happy person. But I had so many demons.”

This is not just about the moment that almost cost the 36-year-old his life. Antonio knows how lucky he was to emerge from the wreckage with only a broken leg after crashing his Ferrari while driving home from training in December 2024, but it is one part of the story and there are plenty more chapters to write.

The former West Ham forward lets it all out in Humans Not Robots, his raw and entertaining new book. After opening with a tale about the crash, the autobiography moves on to a different kind of blow. Antonio talks about the aftermath of West Ham’s win over Fiorentina in the Conference League final in 2023. He had a row with his ex during the celebrations at the Fortuna Arena and could not bring himself to go out with his teammates for the party in Prague.

Antonio zoned out on the bus back to the team hotel. Josh Ewens, a sports scientist at West Ham, felt the decline in Antonio’s mood, telling him he seemed “drained by life”. It hit home. On the journey back from the ground, Antonio thought he was merely weary after helping West Ham win their first trophy in 43 years. “I just went back to sleep on the coach,” he says. “But it wasn’t tiredness from the game. It was tiredness from life. I was going through so much outside of football I just couldn’t muster up the energy to go and enjoy myself.

“A lot of the times it was me telling the boys: ‘Let’s have a party.’ But one of the biggest things that’s ever happened in my life, on that occasion I couldn’t muster the energy to go. I couldn’t understand myself. I never spoke to my teammates about it. They knew that I was going through things with my ex, but they didn’t know how much it was affecting me. In the changing rooms, it’s crazy. No one really cares as long as you’re performing.”

It took the head physio at West Ham to push Antonio into seeking professional help. “I felt like therapy was something for crazy people,” he says, but he feared he was veering towards depression. “I was stuck in limbo. I was going to training and everything just seemed a blur. If I went any longer, I probably would have fallen into depression.”

Talking has given Antonio clarity. He does not hold back in his book. Antonio speaks about the hidden side of the game, about how expendable players are. He did not have an academy upbringing and constantly had to prove people wrong after rising from non-league.

But Antonio dug in and established himself as one of West Ham’s modern greats after joining in 2015. He is the club’s record goalscorer in the Premier League, with 68 goals in 268 appearances. Manuel Pellegrini tried and failed to discard him. Antonio was 29 and came close to retiring. “I was just falling out of love with it,” he says. “Money isn’t happiness. If I’m crying in bed at home I’d rather not do it.”

Again he managed to keep going. Antonio, who joined West Ham as a winger, was briefly used as a right-back by Slaven Bilic. David Moyes struck gold by turning him into a striker. Still there were doubts. West Ham signed other forwards and Antonio feels his contracts never reflected his worth.

“It was the club not appreciating what I do,” Antonio says of the negotiations over money with David Sullivan, West Ham’s co-owner. “The first year, they wanted to pay me like a right-back. Every time they brought in a new player, they got the big contracts. They would constantly bring someone else in on more than what I was getting, even though I was out there doing the job.”

Why not leave? The easy answer is that Antonio loved playing for West Ham. He offered a compromise, saying he would stop playing for Jamaica if West Ham agreed to meet his wage demands. No dice.

“People do treat players like meat,” Antonio says. “As soon as you get a bit stale, they start getting rid of you. People feel like because you’re making good money everything should be cushy, but people go through things as human beings.”

Antonio is not ungrateful. He knows he is privileged. But he collided with reality after his crash. He felt fit after going through rehabilitation, but talks over a new deal with West Ham were fraught. There had been a change while Antonio was out, Graham Potter replacing Julen Lopetegui as manager in January 2025. The mood shifted. Antonio mostly blames his departure in the summer of 2025 on Potter.

“I was angry because I didn’t like how they dealt with it,” he says. “I’m straightforward. Don’t hide anything from me. And he kept on saying to me: ‘We’re going to see what’s going on with you and your contract, I’m going to leave it with the owner, you just need to speak to the owner.’

“Then I’ll speak to the owner and he’ll be like: ‘Graham doesn’t want you.’ I kept going like a yo-yo. At the beginning Sullivan said he was going to give me a contract. I was going to have another year, build myself back instead of having to go out on trial.”

Antonio is scathing about Potter, criticising him for letting too many experienced players go last summer. “They got rid of the core of the senior group,” he says, thinking of himself, Lukasz Fabianski, Vladimir Coufal, Edson Álvarez and Aaron Cresswell.

Antonio watched from afar as West Ham tumbled into a fight to stay in the Premier League. He felt that Potter, who was replaced by Nuno Espírito Santo in September, was wrong to try to make the team more expansive. “Potter wasn’t doing well from January,” he says. “The club backed him in the summer. And then Potter goes: ‘Oh, we’ve got no leaders.’ But you got rid of all the leaders.”

West Ham have gone down, Nuno unable to save them. Antonio feels he could have helped. Instead, he was close to joining Brentford and Leicester, only to sustain muscle injuries. He had a stint in Qatar and is back in London. Antonio has not made up his mind, but is thinking about retirement. He has worked as a pundit and would love to become a presenter. Hosting a gameshow would be a dream come true.

Antonio is using his voice. He was the youngest child in a big family and often had to hold his tongue. He buried his feelings and felt ignored and carried that pain into adulthood. He thinks the United Kingdom needs a therapy revolution, believing children need an outlet.

Do footballers end up in a state of arrested development? “In the changing rooms, it’s like you’re kids,” Antonio says. “There are friends, there are colleagues, but there are 30 people battling for 11 spots. Those 19 people not playing are at times bitching about the players who are. ‘How’s he playing in front of me?’ There’s so many snakes in football, so many people who are fake. I’ve only got two, maybe three footballer friends.”

Antonio thinks about his seven children. “My first child, he’s 14 now. How I raised him and my other kids before therapy is completely different to my other kids. When my son was crying for no reason I was like: ‘Stop crying’. But he’s crying because it’s his emotions that he’s trying to let out. Now I let them cry for a little bit.”

Would he want his children to go into football? It seems Antonio loves the game, but not the industry. “I don’t push my kids,” he says. “My oldest, he’s been trying a few clubs. I say to him every single year: ‘If you don’t want to, don’t feel like you’re getting any pressure from me.’ The politics and being able to deal with fans, managers, owners is so hard. If you haven’t got resilience, you cannot be a football player.”

Antonio has it in spades. But he is done proving people wrong. He is content and free of bitterness. We finish, inevitably, by wondering how often the crash comes up. “All the time. We’ll be having a meeting and talking about anything. And they’ll be like ‘Oh, we can’t skip past the car crash.’ It has been nearly two years now. It was massive. I did almost die, but it’s about moving forward.”

Humans Not Robots by Michail Antonio (HarperCollins) is published on 4 June. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.