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We never wanted for anything in our house, but money certainly didn’t grow on trees, says Dubliner Nicky Byrne. I think my mam and dad, Nikki and Yvonne Byrne, were very proud parents. My dad was a painter and decorator working in an hotel at Dublin airport and my mam was a housewife. I came into the world on 9 October 1978, my sister Gillian is two years older than me and when I was 11 they had a surprise little brother for us all, Adam. No one knew if we were rich or poor, but if I needed new football boots or Gillian was after some new Irish dancing shoes, we got them.

Growing up, my dad was a singer in a cabaret band. Even to this day he sings. Back then he gigged seven nights of the week, working in lots of pubs and clubs around the city. I loved watching him singing. Sometimes I’d see him go out after dinner to his next show. He’d be wearing his white or blue suits ready for the cabaret. He was the lead singer of Nikki & the Studz and for over ten years they had a residence round the corner in the local pub, the Racecourse in Baldoyle, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He used to do a lot of weddings, dinner dances, all that type of thing. He was well known on the Dublin cabaret circuit, me dad. He wasn’t a nationally famous singer, but people around and about knew of him. He worked his ass off to provide for us, definitely. He’d take me to football three nights a week and my mam would take Gill to Irish dancing competitions, while having to feed and school us too. It was a busy household.

My dad worked in the Dublin Airport hotel for 17 years before becoming unemployed. I was only a kid and probably didn’t understand what being unemployed meant. I heard about it on the news and I know now that there were some horrendous times for people in the 1980s. But as a child, I never felt it, I never saw it, other than on the telly. I remember times when my dad wouldn’t be working for a while, then suddenly he’d go out and work on a contract with somebody for, say, six months, then he’d be off work again.

My mam had four sisters – Betty, Marie, Con and Bernadette – and they all had children, our cousins. Every Sunday we’d eat at my nana and granddad’s and every Saturday we’d go to my Nana Byrne for her special soup. I have very early memories of crowding around the Christmas tree in Nana and Granddad’s tiny living room, opening presents. ‘Here you go, Nico. Happy Christmas.’ We used to take it in turns each year to hand out the wrapped-up parcels. It’s a lovely memory. Everyone got a pressie – even the uncles got socks or ‘smellies’, as they would say.

My first love was always football. I was a goalkeeper. My dad used to take me to as many games as he could manage. Then he got me into a schoolboy club in Ireland called Home Farm that was quite well known. He took me to training two or three evenings a week and to the matches at weekends, while he was decorating in the day and gigging at night.

I really laugh now, thinking of the car journeys home after we’d lost or I’d made a mistake. While the lads we were dropping off – usually Brian Rickard and Paul Irwin, still mates to this day – were still in the car, Dad would sit there for a while not saying much, then suddenly he’d go, ‘What happened there for the second goal, Nico?’ There would be a long pause as I thought of an excuse and then he would continue, ‘I think you could have probably done better there, son.’ It was funny.

Football was my life – I could name the Manchester United team backwards and upside down in those days. It meant everything. My bedroom wall was covered in posters of football stars – players like Lee Sharpe and Packie Bonner – and there was also one of Kylie Minogue and one of a girl out of Baywatch with especially big breasts called Erika Eleniak. It was mainly footballers, though.

I was obviously aware of the big pop bands. My sister wanted to sing; she was a huge Bros fan. She wore the bottle tops on the Dr Martens, the leather jackets, ripped jeans, all of that. Bros were really the guinea pigs for what Take That, Boyzone and Westlife all went on to do. That was when the whole boy band thing first entered my world, I suppose. One Christmas my sister got a three-in-one music player from Santa, which was a cassette player, record player and radio. At first she played Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ then ‘When Will I Be Famous?’, ‘Cat among the Pigeons’, all those Bros tunes. As we grew up I would hear A-Ha and Michael Jackson too.

At school, however, music wasn’t really my thing. I didn’t play an instrument and at that age I wasn’t at all interested in the classical music they focused on. My music teacher, Miss Murphy, was lovely and I had a great relationship with her, not because I was particularly musical but more because I was friendly and charming to her, I suppose. I love classical music now – the sound of strings is one of the most beautiful, relaxing things you can hear – but as a kid, you’re not interested really, are you?

I was a confident kid, playing football, messing around, having a good time, but I wasn’t confident enough to sing in public. I was always in choirs, but that wasn’t just me standing there. When it came to my music exam, I was convinced I was going to fail, but luckily 40 per cent of it was practical, just singing. I stood up and sang ‘The Fields of Athenry’, ‘Hey, Jude’ and ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles and an old Irish song called ‘She Moved Through the Fair’. I got full marks and that was enough for me to go on and pass the whole exam. But if I’m being totally honest here, I didn’t really have any interest in music whatsoever at that point. It bored me and was a great time to grab a nap in class.

For a while yet, my path was elsewhere, namely football. I was training constantly and getting pretty good. I was playing in better and better teams and people were starting to talk about me as a genuine prospect. My clubs in Dublin were doing well and I progressed enough to get picked for the Ireland Under-15 side, which was a big deal. One of the proudest moments of my life, even to this day, was standing for the Irish national anthem when we played the tournament hosts Portugal in an Under-18 European Championships. There were no Irish fans there and probably about 15,000 Portuguese. All I could think about was my mam and dad, how proud they’d be and how much they’d love to see this. I actually got emotional for the national anthem as we turned to face the Tricolor just like the senior team would do during the World Cup. That moment will never leave me. It was a special time in my football career.

Once you are playing at that level, professional scouts start flying over to watch you and it wasn’t long before I was offered a two-week trial at Leeds United. My mam was keen for me to finish my studies, but Dad was like, ‘Yes, but it’s Leeds United!’ He felt the same as me. Leeds was one of the top clubs in the UK at the time. Even though I’m a hardcore Man. United fan, this was what I’d dreamed about all my life.

They really liked me at the trial and I was shocked and very, very excited to then be offered a two-year contract for Leeds United FC. I thought this was it, I was made! Any Irish kid who’s a big soccer fan wants to get to England to play; the Irish leagues aren’t as high profile or as well paid (although, playing in those leagues later, I found them to be amazingly tough and physical, an almost bruising experience).

I’d already started dating a girl from school called Georgina, whose father was Bertie Ahern, the future Prime Minister of Ireland (he was Minister of Finance at the time), so it meant we’d have to conduct a long-distance relationship, which neither of us were very pleased about. We’d been to the same secondary school, Pobailscoil Neasain, and I’d admired her from afar for some time. I remember seeing her on the evening news on the steps of Dail Eireann on budget day with her dad and sister and telling my mam, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’ I was 12 years old and Mam thought I was nuts. I’d even got my mate to speak to her about going out with me, but the answer came back, ‘No.’ It was like a dagger through the heart, it really was, I was gutted because I was really falling for this girl. That was about two years after I first saw her. I think we waited another year or two before we arranged to meet at a friend’s party on 8 October 1994, the night before my sixteenth birthday – how many guys remember the first date?! – and we kissed and that was it, the love of my life.

Initially, because I was only 16, I was on a YTS scheme at Leeds, getting £38.50 a week, but as soon as I turned 17 and signed as a professional, I was paid £200 a week for year one then £250 for year two and had free digs, so suddenly I felt rich. Having a bit of spare cash, I was starting to wear a few labels like Dolce & Gabbana, plus I’d got a £5,000 signing-on fee, so it felt amazing.

But then the reality hit home. At first, we stayed in Roundhay in Leeds with a lovely couple called Pete and Maureen Gunby. He was a former Leeds coach. They were really nice to all the players staying with them. In year two, we were moved to lodgings in a purpose-built complex at the new training ground in Thorpe Arch near Weatherby. The digs were like army barracks. There was a strict curfew on nights out and anyone breaking that was disciplined. It was the closest thing to a prison. In the second year, they installed cameras in the corridors outside our rooms. As soon as the door slammed shut, the dream evaporated and you were in these pretty spartan digs, two lads per room. I had a family picture on my dresser and the Tricolor above my bed and a picture of Roy Keane on me wall, but that was as homely as it got. You went up for your food on a tray and sat down to eat in the canteen.

They dished out proper bollockings if you did something wrong – shouting matches, the works. It was a real shock to the system and I got homesick very badly. That second year nearly broke me. I don’t think I ever thought about actually walking – I never had the balls to go home and throw the towel in, that never crossed my mind, I probably should have but I was determined that it wasn’t going to break me – but it did get me pretty down.

One night us Irish lads went out and got pissed. The next morning we were frog-marched into the office and our contracts laid out on the table in front of us. They were sacking us. The coach in charge was shouting in our faces, but it turned out to be a scare tactic. As I wiped the spit from my face and looked around at the other lads, I realized it was working.

It had started so well. Although I was only a junior, just a few months out of school, through a series of injuries to goalkeepers, more senior than me, I was named in the first team squad for a match at Southampton. It was incredible – I was on the first-team coach with all the professionals, big-name players I’d seen on the telly like Gary McAllister, Tony Yeboah, Gary Speed and the Irish legend Gary Kelly and now I was in the squad with them. I didn’t play that day, but it was such a buzz to be even near that level of football. Mam and Dad kept all the paper clippings from back home and even recorded the news on Teletext, they were so proud.

But the honeymoon period didn’t last for long. The problem I had was that I flitted in and out of the team. When that happens, especially as a goalkeeper, football is a very lonely place. When you’re not in the team at that level, often not even as a substitute, you’re nothing more than a boot boy, a drinks boy, pushing skips around with kit in them, like. Sometimes players’ faces fit and sometimes they don’t. It’s the same in any job, the same in boy bands…

One of the few highlights of my time at Leeds was the magic phone. One day, my room-mate Keith Espey went to ring his mum, but the payphone didn’t seem to be working and he was pressing the number 7 in frustration – you know, ‘Come on! Work!’ Then the phone rang, he picked it up and it was his mum. ‘Did you just try to call me?’ she said.

Turned out her phone had rung after all, but for some reason Keith hadn’t had to put any money in. His mum checked on her next bill and there was no sign of the call being reverse charged or anything like that. So we all started doing it – pick up the phone, bang it back down, 7777, wait a few seconds, phone rings, make your call. I was phoning Ireland and we had Welsh lads phoning Wales. Even Harry Kewell,the future Liverpool player who was from Australia, was calling home. It was brilliant!

This was one of the rare highlights, though, as I said. Mentally, those years at Leeds were the toughest time in my whole life. I didn’t get on with the coach, I was only allowed six paid visits home a year, I was homesick and I wasn’t getting picked. The rules were ludicrous – for example if I didn’t shave, I was fined a fiver. There were times when I thought to myself, What am I serving my sentence for? When you are away you get very patriotic and I got very homesick and used to play a lot of Boyzone, funnily enough – ‘Father and Son’, tunes like that. Even more bizarrely, I saw Mikey from that band in a club one night in Howth, County Dublin, surrounded by girls, and that image stuck with me.

By the Christmas of 1997 I knew I was finished with football. My height – 5ft 10in – worked against me, as most modern professional goalkeepers are well over six foot. But also my face and personality weren’t fitting in with certain people at Leeds United, as I said, and I could see the end was coming. Still, I was devastated. This had been my dream since I was knee-high and it was falling apart.

Even the way they broke the news was typical – they said I was one of the best prospects they’d ever seen, but I needed to grow a few inches and that if I didn’t between then and the end of my contract, it wouldn’t be renewed. I was 19. It wasn’t going to happen. Then, when the time came to leave, there wasn’t even a handshake.

My confidence was ruined as a footballer. I’m a very confident person – my mam and dad gave us a really good upbringing and filled us all with confidence – but after Leeds, that had gone, with regards to football at least. There were options: playing in the part-time Irish leagues (I eventually did play for Shelbourne, Cobh Ramblers and St Francis) or playing for English clubs further down the tables like Cambridge or Scarborough. I did try out for a couple, but I wasn’t interested. My heart wasn’t in it anymore.

I retreated to Dublin, gutted. My football dream was over.

To be honest with you, I was dying to get home.