'I can’t run away from it' - Former Sheffield United striker Marlon King opens up over his criminal past

Striker King, who also played for Watford and Birmingham City, had a short spell at Bramall Lane at the end of his playing career, scoring once in a handful of games.

King is perhaps as well known for his off-field controversies as his successes on it. In 2002 he was jailed for receiving stolen goods, and was convicted of sexual assault and assault occasioning actual bodily harm six years later after groping a woman in a bar and then breaking her nose.

He was later arrested on suspicion of dangerous driving and was jailed for 18 months in 2014. King has since moved to Zambia with his wife and children, and opened up about the mistakes of his past in an interview with The Athletic.

“I can’t get back what I did. That’s the thing. I can’t go back,” King said. “Everything I’ve done is public knowledge. I can’t run away from it, so I can’t sit here and say, ‘No, I did this. I did that’. It has taken me years to try and figure myself out and work on myself.

“I cannot change what comes up on Google. I cannot change my path.

"There’s no justification behind any wrongdoings. But my mental mindset right now could not be further from those incidents and those things. Even up to now, I’m finding speaking about issues that I had is therapeutic for me and I think is something I encourage everyone to do in all walks of life, because it helps.

“If you keep things in emotionally, it just builds up and you explode because everybody’s got a limit that they can take. And we give it the ego, ‘I’m alright, Jack, no, we’re OK’ and I think that’s a lot of what I did. I had a lot of things going on, off the pitch. I can openly say I’m one of those people that needed to talk.

"I had a lot of things going on mentally, in terms of my emotions, and they reflected in the wrong way and affected people in the wrong way. I needed to make people understand that I am human and I did have a kind of self-destruct, self-addictive attitude. And it never reflected well.

“I don’t regret the decision to start playing football. I do regret a lot of decisions that I made that affected people’s lives negatively,”

King played almost 500 professional games in his career, and also won 24 caps for Jamaica.

“When my daughter asks me about stuff, those are more challenging questions than any reporter or any fan," he added.

"You’ve got your own daughter saying, ‘Dad, what happened?’. I can’t run away from it,” he says. “I know that I have to take responsibility. I have to answer. I have to look at it.

"I’ll speak to my son and say, ‘There are certain things you have to avoid’, so I don’t look at it as such a negative and let it get me down. I just go, ‘OK, how can I let these youngsters know about the pitfalls that I had, and use it in a positive manner?’

“I’m sorry for what happened, especially to the young lady and to my family members for letting them down. But I’m at a point now where I can look back and think, ‘Jesus Christ. Some of the decisions I made’.”

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