Tipped by Mourinho for stardom and now playing non-league: Ex-Chelsea star opens up about depression

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FT Desk

Sam Hutchinson was part of the Chelsea contingent that travelled to Munich to win the Champions League in 2012 and although he wasn't in the squad, it was a memorable moment for the player.

It sums up the heights that were within his grasp in his career - a career that was also ravaged by lows.

Jose Mourinho was the man who gave Hutchinson his debut in May of 2007, in Chelsea's final home league game of the 2006/07 season against Everton. Hutchinson was 18 years old and came on in the 89th minute.

The Portuguese was full of praise for the youngster at the time and earmarked him as a potential star of the future.

“I know his mentality and I know he’ll be a Chelsea player," Mourinho said on one occasion.

The kid has big potential and because of his size, we have to decide if he can be a top central defender or a top right back. We have to see the definition of his body and make a decision.”

Things would come crashing down for Hutchinson when he was forced to retire at the age of just 20 due to a serious knee injury.

"I had already played for the first team and Mourinho had said some encouraging things about me in interviews," he said, as quoted by BBC Sport.

"Then the injury happened and everything fell apart. I was just a kid. After I retired I was in a bad place with dark thoughts."

Hutchinson would eventually seek help for his depression.

"Unless you get help, you never know how bad you are," he revealed.

"Even telling this story, it's like therapy.

"It's like the old saying - a problem shared is a problem halved. That's true about mental health. If you're suffering in silence, it's not going to help."

Remarkably, he would come out of retirement in 2011 and sign a new 18-month deal with Chelsea as the Blues were keen to see if he could prove his fitness and get back to the level seen previously.

Although he would later leave Chelsea, even experiencing that Champions League victory, he would earn a respectable career, making over 200 appearances in the Championship. In his career, he featured for the likes of Nottingham Forest, Vitesse, Sheffield Wednesday, Pafos, Reading and AFC Wimbledon.

In May of 2025, Wimbledon earned promotion to League One after beating Walsall in the playoff. Three weeks earlier, he had scored the winner against Grimsby but that would prove to be his last game for 11 months after a major health scare.

"Throughout the first half my chest was getting increasingly tighter and I was in so much pain," recalls Hutchinson.

"I felt dizzy and my hands started sweating.

"I was rapidly going downhill but then our centre-back won a great header, the keeper tipped it on to the bar, and it dropped down to me to tap over the line."

After the game, the teach coach diverted to the hospital as his condition deteriorated.

"I was put me in the back of an ambulance and I remember hearing the blues and twos," he said.

"My blood levels had spiked so much, I was in a really bad way. A couple of the paramedics knew who I was because I had played for Nottingham Forest a few years earlier.

"They said: 'You can thank us later for saving your life.' I was told I'd had a heart attack."

Hutchinson spent the next five days in hospital and had successful heart surgery, which would eventually allow him to continue his career, albeit at a lower level after another year with Wimbledon in which he only made a handful of appearances.

"A branch of an artery was blocked 75%. I had an angiogram, external and had a stent put in by a specialist. The one thing that the professor - who had looked after both Tom Lockyer and Christian Eriksen – said was my situation was nothing like theirs.

"It was a blockage and it was all fixed, there was no need for a defibrillator to be fitted."

At the moment, at the age of 37, he is playing non-league football with Farnham Town.

In addition to his football career and spending time with friends and family, Hutchinson has did work for mental health charities as well as the British Heart Foundation.