The ex-Aston Villa star shared how his embarrassing situation was at the lowest point in his career.
The former Aston Villa star from the mid-1990s to the 2000s, Lee Hendrie, experienced an unpleasant situation towards the end of his career. He was 35 years old at the time. His contract with Bradford City expired in 2011. He then flew to Southeast Asia, joining Indonesia’s Bandung FC, before returning to England to play for a non-league team. In January 2012, he went bankrupt and was unable to pay around £235,000 in debt.
Hendrie recalled that moment and shared it on the podcast ‘After the Lights Go Out’, run by TalkSport.
“I was totally embarrassed. The way my situation had come around was I remember driving into a petrol station, and it was a local paper, and it had a big picture.
“I was actually playing for Kiddy at the time and was playing on the Saturday, and I looked at the paper, and it had me on the front, and it had bankrupt in black capital letters.”
The midfielder, who earned one international cap, began to panic because he could not bear having himself exposed in public while stopping for petrol. So, he decided to lay low, hid his face, paid for it and left immediately.
Hendrie, who spent most of his career with The Clarets and Blue, earned more than £30,000 per week at the peak of his career. So, it is rather unthinkable to see him end up bankrupt. The Birmingham-born versatile midfielder explained how it happened.
“Going from those extreme amounts of money and the lifestyle that you live to losing absolutely everything and stripping it back and not being able to do those things, it was a hard lesson.
“There was bad advice because, I mean, there’s a lot of financial advisors. I went into property because all I wanted to do was play football. It was great. I earned the money. I never really had any guidance.”
Hendrie then went on to talk about how he wanted to help out his family, buying a house each for his mother, father and grandparents. Yet, the fatal mistake was dealing with solicitors who practically just drained his finances through legal documents.
“I wanted to look after my parents. And then to get to a stage where you just take your eye off the ball.
“I got married. I went through a terrible divorce. It went on and on. It was a massive, it was a massive thing where these solicitors were getting on to the wives and saying, listen, you can take him for half of the money. It’s a massive dent then. That’s a factor.
“That’s going in my pocket, even though it is for my family and kids, which I would not have paid.
“But to take it to the extreme where we could have had a conversation and dealt with it, which we did end up doing in the end, having paid fortunes for solicitors, letters and all the rest of it, which was just a mess.”
Hendrie was promoted to Aston Villa’s first team in 1994 and stayed until 2006. He was loaned out to Stoke City in 2006/07, which marked the end of his spell at Villa Park. Despite playing for The Lions for a long time, he was not part of the squad when The Lions won the EFL League Cup in 1996.
Overall, he made 308 appearances for the club, netting 32 goals and providing 30 assists in all competitions. The former midfielder played regularly from the 1997/98 to 2004/05 seasons, with his stellar campaigns coming in 1998/99 and 2000/01. In the former season, he bagged three goals and eight assists, while in the latter, he registered six goals and one assist.
The ex-Brighton and Leicester man lost his place starting from the 2005/06 season due to injuries, inconsistency and disciplinary issues. The tactical changes brought by Martin O’Neill in the summer of 2006 led to his departure.
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