Jimmy Bullard's powerful message on invisible health battle after pal's struggle

He’s known as the funnyman of football, the curly cropped clown who made a name for himself with his off-field antics and frivolous attitude to life.

Which is why you have to double take when listening to Jimmy Bullard talking seriously about something - and probably the reason men are listening to him.

Frequently crossing well over the line with his pranks on his fellow footballers - once even writing off TJ Moncur's new sportswear by filing it up with water - Jimmy’s name has become synonymous with mischief and roguish cockney charm.

But today he’s revealing a much more sensitive side, and admits, like so many men he meets, his larger-than-life persona was just a way of hiding his own insecurities.

Soccer AM star Jimmy, 46, stresses he really is that positive-minded, cheerful guy, but that his gobby antics helped him hide the “shy kid” who was inside.

He says: “I’m lucky that I’ve never struggled in that department, but I can relate to the cloak people wear. All that was just for the stage.

“I was a real shy kid at West Ham when my football career started, I was really quiet. I didn’t achieve much and my confidence got a bit dented. Then I became that persona, I’d call myself The Joker, and things started happening. I’d grapple with the referee and had a bit of banter, and then all of a sudden I’d score.

“So I thought, I’ll do that again next week. It was like with that persona came confidence. So I always had this thing, ‘I’m achieving, so I’ll keep this stage presence, I think it’s working.”

It’s one of the reasons Jimmy is backing a campaign for Movember by Pringles to get more men checking in with their mates and talking about their mental health.

Jimmy says: “The number of men who struggle with their mental health is scary. I’ve had friends who have, I’ve seen it and it’s dark and not nice.

“I remember talking to them and them saying, ‘Jim, it’s painful, even though you can’t see it. That’s like real deep. And I was just there for them, I just tried to help in whatever way they needed, I sort of put my doctor’s jacket on.”

It’s this sensitive side, not his reputation as a prankster, which Jimmy says means friends open up to him.

He says: “If you know me as a lot of my friends know me, you'll know that you can pull me to the side. I'm trustworthy, whatever you say to me stays with me. But there's also a side to me where people from the outside think I must be absolutely crackers.”

That reputation has come from a career of on and off-field antics, starting when he moved from West Ham to Peterborough United, followed two seasons later by Wigan Athletic where he scored ten goals in 145 league appearances.

He once stole fellow West Ham teammate Joe Cole’s golf clubs - only telling him seven years later. “It’s all about the time,” laughs Jimmy. “I didn’t tell him straight away, I told him when he was at Chelsea, when he had enough money to not worry. You see, the delivery is everything.”

But there was one time when even Jimmy thought he crossed the line, with a prank on fellow Fulham player TJ Moncur. “He came in with a Peugeot convertible, he was a young kid and was bigging it up as they do. He went off to training and I was injured. So I filled up the car with war. It broke the motor and wrote the car off. That wasn’t a good one. I had to bail him out a little bit.”

Jimmy has another regret. In the run up to the 2006 World Cup, reports circulated that the player had been approached by the German national team, due to the fact he has a German grandfather. Soon after, he was called up by Fabio Capello into the England squad for two qualifiers against Andorra and Croatia.

But despite being seen warming up on the touchline in front of the England manager he didn’t play in either matches.

“I made the England squad after a bit of press came out, which might have been placed by my agent,” chuckles Jimmy.

“Three days in I hadn’t got a cap, and so Peter Crouch and Wayne Bridge were winding me up, saying, warm up in front of him, he’ll put you on. So I was there almost doing a can can in front of him. It was one of those embarrassing moments, if you were there you would have cared. But in the end he just wasn’t interested.

“Then I’m getting changed in the changing rooms and Fabs sits next to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you just tell me you’ve never had a cap, I would have put you on!’”

Jimmy, who now as a successful TV career and also starred on I'm A Celebrity and Celebrity Masterchef, says he’s now on the receiving end of pranks by his daughter with girlfriend Diane, 13-year-old Beau. Their eldest, son Archie, is a rising star in the world of karting and racing.

He says: “Beau is a prankster. She loves making you jump, you know, like real bad, the lights off and proper scaring you.

“Archie’s doing really well, he picked the most expensive sport!

“Beau is a just a big ball of everything. She just went and bought her first golf clubs last night, but she’s into dancing, cricket, netball, art, clothes, make-up, absolutely everything.”

And he says they weren’t too impressed with their famous dad’s career until videos of Jimmy being nutmegged by Cristiano Ronaldo started to appear on TikTok.

“When Archie was six or seven, he came up to me and goes, ‘You played against Ronaldo?!’ He was a big Ronaldo fan, so that was a really good moment. I’d probably told him a hundred times, but he only clocked it when he saw the video.”

• Jimmy Bullard has partnered with Pringles and Movember to get the nation checking in on their mates. Need help reaching out to someone who is struggling? You can now scan the QR code in Mr P’s iconic moustache on select Pringles tubes for help starting the conversation.