What happened to Cherno Samba – the wonderkid who tried to take his own life

If you played Championship Manager shortly after the turn of the millennium, you probably remember the name Cherno Samba – a teenage striker at Millwall who grew up to become one of the greatest players in the world. That’s how it went in the game, anyway. Real life wasn’t quite so straightforward.

Samba was just 15 when he started to be touted as one of England’s brightest prospects – in the end, he was retired by 30 having survived a suicide attempt. This is what happened to Samba, and what he’s doing now.

‘I just wanted to end my life’

Samba rose to prominence as a schoolboy after scoring 132 goals for Millwall at academy level – a record which earned him caps for England’s age group sides and a reported £2m bid from Liverpool.

It was the collapse of the move to Anfield which seems to have started off the premature decline of what promised to be a sparkling career.

“I think I was what, 15… Just dropped to the kitchen [floor] and started crying,” Samba later said in an interview with CNN. “Just devastated – devastated. And I think from then that’s when my world shattered, to be honest.”

Samba took a six-month sabbatical before he turned 16 before returning to Millwall, signing a pre-contract deal with the club, although he would never feature in a senior game, with pressure from his premature fame taking its toll.

That pressure hit a new high when Championship Manager 01/02 was released. In that game, Samba was one of the most gifted wonderkids in world football, and suddenly his name was known to armchair managers around the world. The hype reached a new pitch, and while Samba later told the BBC that he never played the game himself, he was only too aware of his digital prowess.

“Sometimes the lads that I would be playing against would be teasing me, and saying ‘that’s your stats, and you’re not doing that now’ sort of thing,” he told CNN. “So it was playing on my mind, and sometimes before a game I’d think ‘the world knows me in these sorts of stats – I have to deliver.’”

His fame was growing in his homeland, too – he was born in Banjul, the capital of Gambia, and moved to London when he was six, and his burgeoning reputation made news back home, leading to a football academy being named after him in 2003, when he was just 18.

With pressure growing from all corners and his mental health declining, Samba left Millwall in 2004 to try and find a fresh start in Spain with Cádiz. Sadly, his troubles continued, with depression compounded by a dependence on painkillers which came about after a bad injury – all of which culminated in an attempted overdose.

“I was alone. I was by myself, I was lonely. I had the most beautiful apartment looking over the sea, and I just kept constantly thinking about my time in England. I didn’t want to be there – I just wanted to end my life.”

A team-mate found him unconscious in his apartment shortly after the suicide attempt and rushed him to hospital, with Samba saying that he “woke up” from the worst of his mental health issues afterwards.

What followed was a nomadic and largely unsuccessful career. A few matches with Málaga’s B team helped him to get back on track far enough to earn a two-year contract with Championship side Plymouth Argyle, for whom he scored one league goal in 13 games before a short loan spell with Wrexham, then in League Two, while he also made four appearances for his birth country, Gambia, around the same time, scoring once against Tunisia in a friendly.

After his Plymouth contract ran down, Samba took his show on the road, but with injuries continuing to prove a problem his career wasn’t going anywhere fast despite all of the air miles – seven games for FC Haka in Finland, a brief spell with Panetolikos in Greece which didn’t yield any appearances, a few goals for Norwegian second-tier side FK Tønsberg.

Samba played his last professional match in 2012 at the age of 27, formally announcing his retirement three years later after further injuries rendered his search for a new club hopeless. One of the great talents of the game had petered out with so little to show for it. But at least he was alive – and would soon find himself succeeding in other areas.

What Cherno Samba did after football

In 2018, Samba released his autobiography, ‘Still In The Game’, which not only detailed his battles with depression and the decline of his once-promising career, but also revealed that he had, somewhere along the line, found his love for football once more.

Around the time of his book’s release and the media rounds he did alongside it, Samba told interviewees that he was studying for his coaching qualifications, but he seems to have gone down a different road – and is now an agent.

Among his clients are Newcastle United goalkeeper Martin Dúbravka and Molde’s Daniel Daga, who was named in Goal’s NXGN list of the 50 brightest young talents in world football, alongside several other young talents with seemingly bright futures, many from Africa, where he has travelled on a number of scouting trips.

It’s hard to imagine anyone whose experiences, as difficult as they were, could put them in a better position to advise young players taking their first steps in the professional game, whether it’s with Brighton (as with 21-year-old midfielder Samy Chouhane) or at Barcelona (in the case of Ghanian prospect Aziz Issah.

Encouragingly, his social media hints at a man who relishes his new role, his life and who seems to be a wellspring of positivity having emerged from some immensely challenging times. Now 40, Samba certainly seems to be loving life, 25 years after he first became famous.