Andy van der Meyde admits he “ruined everything” during his time at Everton as he spiralled into major addiction problems

Everton flop Andy van der Meyde finally seems to have come circle when it comes to offering remorse for his lacklustre spell at Goodison Park. David Moyes fended off reported interest from Tottenham Hotspur and Monaco to snap up the Dutch international from Internazionale in 2005 following the Blues’ qualification for Champions League football.

But after an underwhelming 24-game spell in which he failed to score, he’d never play another top-flight match after being released by the Blues as a 29-year-old in 2009, finishing his career with just six outings for minnows WKE in the fourth tier in the Netherlands.

Writing in his 2012 autobiography, van der Meyde took aim at Everton, David Moyes and some of his former team-mates. While in a separate interview in 2020, he claimed there were only two players at the club when he was there who “could play football.”

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Back in 2022, the Arnhem-born former player admitted: “I had a lot of aggression in me. I said some bad things about Everton, some stupid things. I was not thinking straight.

“I think: ‘Wow, man, really stupid. You played at Everton, a great club. You really messed up, man. How could you mess this up, you were so talented?’

“I was thinking like a child. I felt like everybody was against me, but that was not the case. I just didn’t listen. I was stupid. Really stupid.”

Now the 45-year-old has gone a step further and detailed how his own going off the rails destroyed both his professional and private life. Sport Witness quote van der Meyde as telling Prime: “I ruined everything.

“My football career was almost over when I went to England, it all ended because I did a lot of stupid things, I was young and with a lot of money, and I had a double life. I cheated on my ex-wife, she didn’t deserve all this, she was a good woman.

“I gave up my children for someone else. I will never forgive myself for this, it’s only my fault, I can’t blame anyone else for this. “I lived in Liverpool, and we went out on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We drank a lot, and the satisfaction was never enough.

“When alcohol wasn’t enough for me anymore, I started with drugs, cocaine. I wasn’t myself anymore.

“There were problems with the coach, my private life was complicated. The little princess (his daughter) spent the first three years of her life in hospital.

“It was all a mix of problems. That’s why everything started to go wrong. “Then I understood. After two nights in which I was full of cocaine I called my agent, and I told him I had to go: ‘I want to get out of Liverpool, otherwise I’ll end up killing myself’.

“My wife, she saved me. If I had had her with me when I was a footballer, I would have been one of the best wingers ever.”