James Maddison's Tough Year: From Injury to Parenthood
James Maddison leans back in his chair and laughs as he says it, but the line lands with weight: he and his partner have been “in the trenches”.
Five children. All aged four and under. Two sets of twins. And in the middle of it all, a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament and a lost season.
The Tottenham midfielder opens up on The Football Interview, which returns on BBC One at 12:45 every Saturday during the Premier League season and is also available on BBC iPlayer, BBC Football’s YouTube channel and the BBC Sport website and app. In the first episode of the new campaign, airing on Saturday, 22 August, Kelly Somers sits down with a 29-year-old who has lived a year that would break plenty of people.
A brutal year, on and off the pitch
Maddison missed most of the 2025-26 season after tearing his ACL last August, an injury that ripped him away from the rhythm of Premier League life and into a long, lonely rehab.
At home, life was anything but quiet.
During his recovery, his partner gave birth to their second set of twins. The house turned into a whirlwind of nappies, sleepless nights and chaos. Maddison calls it “the toughest year of his life” and you don’t doubt him.
“A lot of nappies flying about, a lot of accidents at home, but it'll all be worth it,” he says. The smile is there, but so is the fatigue of someone who has been living on the edge of exhaustion.
“We still love it. I wouldn't change it for the world.”
He leans heavily on his family in the telling. That support, he says, helped drag him through the darkest parts of his rehab.
“I needed that positive distraction of my partner being pregnant and having to be there for her and forget about myself, even though I was going through a traumatic experience through my knee,” he tells Somers. The injury might have dominated his professional life, but at home he had no choice but to park his own pain and get on with being a dad.
‘He thought I’d left Spurs’
The scale of his absence hit hardest in one simple moment with his eldest son, Leo.
“I missed a year of football, and a year in a child's life – from three and a half to four and a half – it's obviously massive,” Maddison says.
Leo, who used to be a regular at games, had started to assume his dad simply didn’t play for Tottenham any more. “He couldn't even remember over a year ago when he was at all the games,” Maddison admits.
That stings. You can hear it.
“It would be nice for him to come to the games again and actually remember Dad playing instead of just Dad sat at home watching him with a machine on his knee.”
That image – the creative hub of Spurs, strapped to a rehab device while his son watches on – sums up the disconnect of his year out.
Watching Spurs suffer from the sofa
Tottenham’s season did little to ease the frustration. Spurs staggered through a grim campaign, only securing survival on the final day and finishing just two points above the relegation zone.
Maddison, a player who thrives on being at the heart of things, could only watch.
“We probably struggled a little bit for creativity and I'm watching the games thinking, 'what would I be doing there?',” he says. The itch to get on the pitch never really left. It just had nowhere to go.
As the team laboured, he was stuck on the outside, rehabbing, parenting, replaying matches in his head. The gap between what he wanted to do and what his body allowed grew wider by the week.
De Zerbi changes the mood
Then came a shift. In March, Roberto de Zerbi arrived.
Spurs’ Italian head coach walked into a club drained of confidence and a squad carrying the scars of a relegation battle. Maddison describes a man who knew exactly what needed fixing first.
“He's very clever. He's very tactical. He's obsessed with football, you can see that,” Maddison says. But De Zerbi didn’t turn up with a thick playbook and endless meetings.
“When he first came in – in comparison to pre-season and what we're training now – he didn't want to make it too complicated. He just wanted us to get the love back for playing football.”
The football obsessive started by going off-script.
One of his first moves was to organise a team meal. Not a dry, performance-nutrition-approved gathering. A proper night out.
The 29-year-old recalls De Zerbi telling the squad: “We're all going to be drinking alcohol, we're all going to be having a good night.”
No mixed messages, no half-measures.
“He wanted us to have a night where we all just relax,” Maddison explains. “That feeling that we got made everyone feel more knitted together, straight away.”
In a season suffocated by pressure, it was a deliberate release valve. A reset.
Back on the bench – in slippers if needed
De Zerbi’s next move was more surprising, at least to Maddison.
Still working his way back from his ACL injury, the midfielder didn’t feel ready to be involved. The Italian disagreed.
Another thing De Zerbi did early in his tenure was to put Maddison on the bench.
“I was almost like, 'I'm not ready to play yet, boss',” Maddison says.
The answer came back quickly. De Zerbi told him he could come on the bench “in my slippers” if he wanted. The message was clear: your presence matters, even if you can’t yet kick a ball.
“He just wanted me around the group and he thought that would benefit the group,” Maddison says. “I took that as a massive compliment and just acted as if I was part of the bench, part of the team.”
Spurs eventually pulled themselves away from danger. Maddison won’t claim the credit. “I'm not saying that's the reason why, but we managed to steer clear of the danger, which was a good feeling.”
Still, having him back in and around the squad symbolised a club starting to feel like itself again.
Eyes on a clean, healthy season
Maddison finally made his return on the pitch against Leeds on 11 May, a date that felt a long way from the August afternoon when his knee gave way.
He has not been risked in pre-season so far, with Spurs cautious after such a serious injury, but the midfielder sounds bullish about what comes next.
“I'm working so hard to try and be fully fit and available for the majority of the season,” he says. The aim is simple and, after the year he has had, precious.
“I want just a fully fit, healthy season where I can just enjoy football. Because if I'm fully fit and I'm healthy, then I know what I'm capable of. And I know that I can affect games more than a lot of players in this league. So, let's just hope for that.”
The trenches at home remain. The demands of the Premier League will return. Maddison is ready to step back into both.
