Joe Thompson is going back to where it all began.
On Saturday morning, he will pitch up at Old Trafford, the theatre of his childhood dreams. From there, he will walk to Salford, past the pitches on Littleton Road where he spent so many evenings training at Manchester United’s academy. Late in the afternoon, he will arrive in the foothills of the South Pennines at Rochdale, the club that became his home and sanctuary.
In total, Thompson and a group of friends, supporters and former team-mates are hoping to raise funds by walking 21.7 miles from Old Trafford to the Crown Oil Arena, stopping off at other football grounds across Greater Manchester en route. It is some going for a guy fighting cancer for the third time.
More than a decade has passed since Thompson, then a 24-year-old midfielder at Tranmere Rovers, was first diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. He went through a course of chemotherapy, beat it and got on with his career.
It came back and he beat it again, this time undergoing a stem cell transplant in the summer of 2017 and, in a remarkable twist, returning to score the goal that saved Rochdale from relegation to League Two in 2018.
But cancer is the toughest of opponents. After four years in remission, it came back late last year. This time, he was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma, meaning the cancer had spread beyond the lymph nodes to other organs — in his case, to his lungs.
Once again, he was under attack from the condition he likens to a “snake wrapping itself around my neck and my body“.
A specialist in Germany said he could hardly believe Thompson was still standing, so large was the growth on his right lung and the two on his left lung. Another three rounds of chemotherapy brought no improvement, so that has been put on hold.
Life is fragile. He has had many reminders of that over the last 11 years. But his life has been full of struggles and adversity. And as he keeps telling himself, what doesn’t break you helps to make you.
There is no easy way to describe Thompson’s childhood, initially growing up in a council flat in Bath, south-west England.
He portrays his father as a volatile figure who was in and out of prison, and his mother as a “wonderful person” who has bipolar disorder and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. There was also the trauma of seeing his brother Reuben injured by a hit-and-run driver and left with tyre marks on his face.
It was in the hope of finding stability that the boys and their sister moved to Manchester to live with an aunt. Their mother followed after being discharged from hospital. It was in Manchester that Thompson first started to play football — and showed so much promise that he was soon invited to join United’s academy.
He describes those years at United as “a wonderful time”, pulling up in the car park in the hope of glimpsing one of the superstars — David Beckham and Ryan Giggs in the early years, Cristiano Ronaldo and Ryan Giggs at the end — feeling so close to the big time even though, in reality, he was not.
He winces at the memory of tapping Sir Alex Ferguson on the shoulder and trying to run off before United’s legendary manager could work out which cocky teenager had done it. Ferguson confronted him a few weeks later and told him, “I hope you’re as confident on the pitch as you are with your mates.”
At times he felt he was, playing alongside Tom Cleverley, Danny Welbeck and Danny Drinkwater, who all went on to win the Premier League, and Fraizer Campbell, who, like those three, went on to play for England.
But he knew his hopes of a professional contract with United were fading when he began to feel himself “physically being left behind” while his peers were having growth spurts.
“The game became more physical and I felt like Simba in that scene in the Lion King where there’s the stampede,” he says. “I was getting run over sometimes. I was no longer impacting games the way I had before.”
But even though he saw it coming, rejection by United, the club he loved, was still hard to take when it came days before his 16th birthday. For weeks he was in denial — perhaps not to himself, but he felt unable to tell his friends. They would turn up at his house to ask if he was free. “And I would quickly put on my training kit and say, ‘No, sorry, I’ve got training tonight’,” he says. “Then I would just go to my room and cry.”
Some players never get over that rejection. There were talented players in his age group at United who had stopped playing altogether by their early 20s.
Thompson feels he could easily have been one of them. He turned down offers from several clubs before his mother eventually persuaded him he might enjoy dropping down the league and thriving as “a bigger fish in a smaller pond”.
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Sure enough, Thompson found a warm, welcoming environment at Rochdale and thrived there — finding, in their then-manager Keith Hill, the kind of father figure he wanted and needed.
He settled into a happy existence at Rochdale, helping them win promotion to League One in 2010 and meeting Chantelle, who is now his wife.
But a move to Tranmere in the summer of 2012 didn’t go as planned. In his second season there he found himself struggling for form, feeling sick and short of energy.
For months, he put his fatigue down to sleepless nights since the birth of his daughter. “And then it all just came to a head one weekend,” he says, “where the game was going on at a million miles an hour around me and I felt like I was in slow motion.”
Afterwards, he spoke to a member of Tranmere’s medical staff, who was alarmed to see Thompson had several umps on his neck. As a matter of urgency, he was sent to see a specialist, who recommended a biopsy.
To his horror, the scans showed huge tumours on his chest and he was told they were at risk of spreading. They were reckoned to have been there for two years. At that point, he says, it was as if the walls of the examination room were closing in on him. “The word cancer strikes fear into people,” he says. “It all came crashing down.”
But chemotherapy was successful. “And I was maybe slightly arrogant about it,” he says. “As a footballer, you pride yourself on your body and I thought, ‘Yes, that’s it. I’ve done it. I can get on with my career again’.”
So he did… though not at Tranmere, who, to his shock, released him when his contract expired at the end of that season. “That was the first moment I saw football for its ruthlessness,” he says. “You’re just a product. If you’re not there on the pitch, doing the business, you can be moved on — no matter what the circumstances are.”
Thompson moved on to Bury and then, after loan spells at Wrexham and Southport, to Carlisle United. He struggled to get back to the level he had reached before his first cancer diagnosis. He began to feel anxious, doubting his body.
Only at Carlisle and after returning to Rochdale in 2016 did he begin to find his rhythm and confidence again. And then a routine follow-up scan revealed the cancer was back. At first, he was angry, feeling a deep sense of injustice, dismayed by the thought of it taking him away from his family. Such feelings were soon overtaken by a burning desire to fight back.
Remarkably, in consultation with Hill and the doctors, Thompson was given the all-clear to continue playing. He kept playing for the next two months, feeling no ill effects. If anything, his sense of purpose was heightened.
“Then it all came to a head in one game where I ran to the dressing room at the end and was violently sick,” he says. “I said to the club doctor, ‘That’s it. I’m done’. That’s when I went to the hospital and started my treatment again — chemo again and then a stem cell transplant.”
He describes the stem cell transplant in the summer of 2017 as a bleak experience, kept in isolation for six weeks: “Cabin fever, the walls start talking to you.” He didn’t know whether he was going to get out alive. He certainly had no expectation of playing football again.
He laughs at the memory of his first day back at Rochdale’s training ground and how self-conscious he felt — “no hair, no eyebrows, I’d lost three and a half stone” — until his team-mate Ian Henderson walked over, handed him the smallest dumbbells in the gym and said, “We’ve got work to do, JT.”
Eventually, after months in the gym, he built up his strength and fitness and was ready to train with his team-mates. “Horrendous,” he says. “It was the first time I’d had my boots on for nearly 12 months. I felt like Bambi on ice.”
The Lion King, Bambi… Thompson loves a Disney analogy. What nobody would have dared to imagine at that time, as he made his tentative first steps back onto the training pitch, was that there would be a fairytale ending to that 2017-18 season.
Two minutes after coming on as a substitute in their final game against Charlton Athletic, Thompson cut back onto his left foot, drilled a low shot and scored the goal that saved Rochdale from relegation to League Two.
Happy Joe Thompson day, Dale fans 😃#OnThisDay 2⃣ years ago…
@JJL_Thompson scored THAT goal to keep us in @SkyBetLeagueOne on the final day of the season 🤩#RAFC pic.twitter.com/j1bXLtRxLx
— Rochdale AFC (@officiallydale) May 5, 2020
He likens that moment to something like nirvana: “Everything went silent for me — just white noise in the background — and time stood still for a few seconds.”
Then came the noise, as fans and team-mates went berserk. “I felt like I was soaring through the sky,” he says. “It was the ultimate give-back because of everything all those people at Rochdale had given me — all the support and all the patience. There were some tears that day.”
And if life was like a Disney movie, that’s where the credits would have rolled: Thompson feeling on top of the world again after all he had been through.
Or perhaps there would have been an epilogue reflecting everything he has done since hanging up his boots nine months later: winning the English Football League’s Sir Tom Finney Award, becoming a presenter for the BBC and MUTV (Manchester United’s television station), doing mentoring and motivational talks, raising funds for charity and, best of all, becoming a father again, driven by the desire to be the kind of dad he never had.
In late 2021, more than four years after his stem cell transplant, a specialist gave him the all-clear. Finally, Thompson said on social media, “I am a free man. A day that I have longed for for eight years, man.”
Then two years later, out of the blue, hitting him like a wrecking ball, came the news of another recurrence.
It has been different this time. To date, chemotherapy hasn’t worked. He has found himself exploring other avenues, alternative therapies, reading up and researching in the hope of finding something — anything — that can give him and others a winning edge in the battle against cancer.
Beyond that, he is thinking about legacy. He hopes to develop a wellness centre for those living with cancer, “something tangible, something that hopefully over the years and decades my children can drive past and say, ‘We helped to make that happen’”.
Hence this weekend’s walk, Walk With Me For JT, where he will be joined by some of his old team-mates at United, former Manchester City players Joleon Lescott, Nedum Onuoha and Stephen Ireland and two of his former managers, Hill and Keith Curle, in trudging across Greater Manchester.
The idea came from his former Rochdale team-mate Stephen Darby, who has spent six years living with motor neurone disease, for which there is no known cure.
“I was feeling sorry for myself at the time,” Thompson says. “Darbs asked me, ‘What’s your challenge? What are you hoping to achieve?’. I said, ‘Hopefully to get to get the all-clear’.
“And Darbs said, ‘No, no, no. Beyond that, further down the track, what’s the legacy going to be?’. I told him about the idea of the wellness centre. Darbs said, ‘That’s great. Do this walk. Push yourself to do it. It will get you out. It will give you a purpose’.”
Thompson says the support he has received within the football community has been “incredible”. When a blood clot prevented Thompson from flying to Germany to see a specialist, former Manchester United, Sunderland and Scotland defender Phil Bardsley stepped in and paid for a car to take him.
That was the same specialist — a dead-ringer for Arsene Wenger, he says — who told Thompson he was lucky he was still standing. Now he is ready to pull on his walking boots and to keep trying to make a difference. Still standing, but never standing still.
(Top photo: Oliver Kay/The Athletic)
