If you want to become a professional football player at any level, when you're growing up, you have to make sacrifices, and it's very difficult. It's not easy, but you have to train hard, you have to live right, and you have to rest.

Even when I was growing up as a young boy, when I was playing schoolboy football, there were other guys who were as good as I was, maybe some even better technically. But I was prepared to stick to what was going to make me become a professional football player when I left school, and that was a lot of sacrifice and because my attitude was right.

I've watched parents sometimes on the touchlines at youth games, and they are screaming and shouting, which is not the way to go.

When you talk about professional footballers, rightly or wrongly, people often already have an idea in their head about what they're like; they'll paint a picture before they've met them.

I was always active as a child. My dad tried to place me in every sport imaginable. I had so much energy, he wanted to push me in a direction where that energy was used appropriately to keep me out of trouble and focused while I was in school.

For its part, one of the keys of Tottenham is that it has players who know each other very well for two or three years. They have not made changes and are managed by the same coach, Mauricio Pochettino. Therefore, they perfectly apply the idea of team and style of play.

Every team learns when they lose a game.

I am preparing myself to leave football. I have always thought that once you get past 30, it is time to reflect on when you should go, and that is what I have done.