Life as a professional footballer is "very mental, literally", says an English star who is keeping their identity under wraps as musician DIDE.

Speaking to the Daily Star on a video call with his camera off, DIDE spoke passionately (with a London accent) about how important it is for footballers to be able to express themselves. Whether that's creatively or offering a bit more of their personality to fans beyond 90 minutes each week.

DIDE himself should know. Since releasing 'Thrill' as a bombshell debut single last year, he's been raking in over 100,000 monthly Spotify listeners with even more people obsessed with guessing who's beneath the mask. Not bad for a brand new artist with relatively little marketing behind him pushing his name out there.

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In fact, the surprise career move was all pretty spontaneous. DIDE told the Daily Star: "It was pretty organic the way that it came round maybe like two or three months.

"Football’s always been the main thing in my career, it’s always been my main passion but music just was an organic thing that kind of just happened.

"I feel like everything happens for a reason, timing is everything. The way that it all happened, the way that it kicked off at the start, you know, I never could have predicted it, the way that it all happened and the timing was right in that sense."

From his lyrics to our interview, it's abundantly clear how glad DIDE is to be getting thoughts and feelings off his chest through an art form he's long admired. As a result, rapping has felt like therapy for the disguised star and so many of his peers want to channel their emotions in their own way.

DIDE said: "I feel like a lot of footballers are craving that creativity to be able to express themselves and obviously for me music was a part of that, just you know, therapeutic and that’s kind of how it happened.

"Footballers are very creative naturally and if they’re given an opportunity to express themselves then they'll definitely be able to show more of themselves. More of their personality and for me not only music, but with fashion and all the different hobbies that us footballers go through.

"Just expressing ourselves is always seen as a positive thing in my opinion and that’s what I’m trying to do."

He added their often lonely daily routines cry out for some kind of avenue for expression. DIDE told us: "The lifestyle that we’re living on and off the pitch, you know very hectic, it’s very up and down, very mental literally. I was at home after one training session, the lyrics just started coming to my head and then yeah it kind of just happened.

"I feel like when I make music it’s very therapeutic, very natural. It’s never really forced and yeah if the beat is inspiring for me, if I’m mentally inspired then yeah that’s kind of how the music happened.

"A lot of the time just being alone, when you’ve just finished a game, you lose a game or you didn't have the best performance, you know a lot of the fans don’t understand what goes through our mental space.

"Obviously we always strive for the best and unfortunately we are human beings and we do make mistakes as well. It’s just about finding a way to mentally get over those challenges, get over them hurdles and for a lot of us it’s quite challenging.

"It’s quite difficult, you know you don’t really have a support system out there and a lot of us have got to lean on other things in order to cope, and for me personally that’s music."

Interestingly DIDE points out a correlation between how creative players are on the pitch and how creative they are off it.

He added: "A lot of the players that you see on the pitch that are very creative I feel like they naturally off the pitch as well, they express themselves in a different way.

"They have a different aura about themselves and I think for me personally that was something I was trying to emulate and I feel like it’s in me naturally so that’s kind of how it all started in the music, I’ve kind of just taken it as it comes really.

"There’s a lot more messages that us footballers want to put out to the world and a lot more for the fans not only from a football perspective but just generally want to express and yeah like there’s a lot more to come from the music side of things."