A book entitled ‘Goodison Gazza’ tells the story of Billy Kenny, a talented youngster who was touted by many major soccer clubs but signed for Everton, the club he supported, with a great future ahead of him. He was seen to be the next Paul Gascoigne (Gazza), the man who was, in the words of the National Football Museum, “widely recognised as the most naturally talented English footballer of his generation”. Kenny was destined to hit the heights of success. However, his addictive personality and compulsive behavioural traits took control and saw him fall from those heights within a very short period of time, leading to him being ignominiously sacked for ‘gross misbehaviour’ and spiralling out of football in a haze of drugs and alcohol at the tender age of 21, following a similar sad road to Gascoigne. Tellingly, he writes: “Iwas just a kid and no one was there for me”.

There are similarities to that story in another field when we think of Susan Boyle who shot to an astonishing musical career after her audition on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ stunned the judges and captivated the audience. For years she had tried to fulfil her dream of singing and eventually succeeded. Her subsequent astonishing success, however, heavily affected her mental health, leading to her being briefly admitted to a psychiatric clinic, where a psychiatrist who treated her criticised the production company for not performing a psychological evaluation on her, explaining that exposing someone to such sudden fame could be “terribly risky.” Who was there for her?

Susan Boyle launched her career by singing the powerful ballad ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ from the highly successful musical ‘Les Miserables’, in which the central character Fantine dreams of a vastly different, happier, and innocent life. The words of the song describe “there are dreams that cannot be, and there are storms we cannot weather! I had a dream my life would be so different from this hell I’m living, so different now from what it seemed… Now life has killed the dream I dreamed…”

Many a parent has dreamed a dream for their child while many a child has dreamed that dream – indeed, motivators are always encouraging youngsters to dream big, to have that dream. Many of us dream of sporting success for our children. We want them to play for the country. We want them to play for successful teams. We want them to thrive in the sporting arena. We want them to be known and celebrated – and rich. We do so all the more when our own sporting career never materialised.

Is there anything wrong with that? The obvious answer is “No”. However, the strong reality is that, in the words of the song, “the dreams we have for our children may not be”. Many things may kill the dream both before and even once it is achieved. In simple terms, we should do the Maths: in a race, eight people aim to succeed, with others pushing them hard, yet the reality is that only one wins, so seven fail. In pushing them all to succeed, we are actually pushing most to fail. The dream of success can quickly become a nightmare.

So, what is wrong with success? We repeat, “Nothing”. What is wrong is that we do not prepare youngsters for what comes with success. We fail to realise that in pushing people to succeed we are pushing more people to fail – and we do not prepare youngsters for failure either. And what happens when the dream is shattered by injury? Have we prepared them for that possibility?

More than that though, we should note that often attaining that elusive success can lead to failure, as competitors often lose their competitive streak and become arrogant, complacent, conceited, casual, lazy, cocky, busy even, because no-one was there for them. It can also lead to failure in other areas as Billy Kenny and Susan Boyle found out, because no-one was there for them. Are we there for them, for the right reasons (and not for our own benefit) when we push them to succeed?

Indeed, it is not life that has killed the dream; it is the dream itself, perhaps. Dreamers become the miserable ones, the wretched ones. The financial benefits cannot be measured or balanced by the emotional, mental, social, spiritual cost of success. As the American comedian and humourist Fred Allen once ironically reflected that “A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to be well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.” The apparent delights and benefits of success do not always measure up. And who is there to help them? These are just kids, remember.