‘I went limp, slid to the floor… and stopped breathing’: Former Millwall captain MATT LAWRENCE on his crippling drug addiction, the bad batch that ‘killed’ him (twice) and how he’s rebuilding his life in New York

Matt Lawrence died twice in March 2021. 

Only nine years after bringing his career as a professional footballer to an end, 17 years after he walked out beside Manchester United’s Roy Keane as Millwall captain in the FA Cup final, he lay lifeless in a New York street.

Lawrence was in the grip of a drink and drug habit and the cocaine he had bought turned out to be laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid deadly in anything but the most miniscule quantities.

The first time was on St Patrick’s Day, and his good fortune was that he was – as so often during the height of his addictions – out in Manhattan with people around to raise the alarm. He was resuscitated by the emergency services and taken to hospital.

Three New Yorkers died the same day, taking drugs cut with fentanyl and sold from the same batch. The dealer responsible, who ran a door-to-door delivery service, was sentenced in 2023 to 30 years in prison for selling drugs resulting in death.

Text messages from Lawrence to his dealer warning that the cocaine he had sold him could be lethal were used in court.

Four days later, on March 21, having discarded the remnants of a small bag of cocaine he took that night, Lawrence picked up another small bag bought at the same time. He went out, took the drugs and died again when the fentanyl kicked in. This time inside a bar. The outlook was so bleak a priest issued the last rites.

‘It’s scary how I came to normalise everything,’ Lawrence tells Daily Mail Sport. ‘Normalised buying drugs, which is illegal. Normalised being an angry person because that’s what drugs do. They make you snappy and argumentative.

‘I managed to normalise dying because I came out of hospital and didn’t stop. I normalised dying twice in the space of four days.’

His recall of those incidents is incomplete. ‘The first time, I remember going to the bathroom, doing the drugs and feeling a bit weird,’ he says. ‘I walked back to the bar past the person I was with and said I was going to get some air.

‘Everything else I know is from the accounts I’ve read, and that’s that I walked halfway across Bleecker Street and passed out, stopped breathing and a Good Samaritan stopped the traffic. I didn’t breathe again until the emergency services gave me a Narcan shot in the middle of the road.’

Narcan is the brand name for naloxone, an emergency antidote which instantly reverses the effects of opioids.

‘Apparently, I didn’t want to go to hospital and was fighting off the paramedics, so they sedated me and I woke up in hospital. Four days later, it happened again. In a bar, I remember sitting down in a chair, three or four of us around a table, and I don’t remember any more. My friend said I just went limp and slid onto the floor.

‘My muscles stopped working. I stopped breathing. I was given the last rites, it was that close. There is CCTV footage but I haven’t been able to watch it. Again, luckily, this is the middle of Manhattan and the emergency services were there very quickly.

‘This time I do remember waking up with a needle in my arm. I assume that was the Narcan. None of this sounds particularly good out loud. I’m talking because I need the catharsis. This is me purging my soul in a way. I need the reality to hit. I need other people to read it.’

Lawrence is 52 years old, more than a year clean and sober and talking publicly for the first time about what happened. He looks in good shape. Lean and healthy, recently recovered from an achilles tendon torn playing football. His eyes are bright, he smiles and laughs easily and fires out one-liners, almost all of them at his own expense.

He is apprehensive about telling his story but determined and once he starts, the words flow freely.

Lawrence did not, he insists, ever take drugs during a 16-year playing career which peaked in the Championship and blended minor successes in with the inevitable disappointments.

Relatively late into the professional game, he was 21 when he first signed for Wycombe Wanderers, having completed a football scholarship at Hartwick College in New York and played a handful of games in non-League for Grays Athletic. From Wycombe he went to Fulham and back, fighting a feeling that he did not really belong.

‘I’d been unwanted by John Gregory at Wycombe and unwanted at Fulham by Kevin Keegan, who was a hero of mine,’ says Lawrence. ‘Every second of my professional football career was amazing, but I just didn’t believe in it or believe in me to start off with.’

These insecurities continued even when he was a proven Championship player at Millwall. ‘I probably came across as arrogant because we’d go into children’s hospitals at Christmas and I’d hide away,’ he says. ‘I’d be like, “These kids don’t want to see me dressed as Santa”. It wasn’t because I thought I was too good, it was because I didn’t think I was good enough.’

Six years at Millwall included a glorious run to the club’s first FA Cup final in 2004 and their first European campaign, albeit brief.

‘The FA Cup final is a blur,’ says Lawrence. ‘I remember the semi-final vividly against Sunderland. The final though, I remember we lost 3-0, I remember Cristiano Ronaldo was very good and I remember Ruud van Nistelrooy kicked me in the testicles.

‘I trod on Van Nistelrooy’s achilles when he was in a wall and he obviously clocked me doing that. Then they had a corner and I was facing him, sort of on the half-turn and looking at the ball, and he straight-up sprinted towards me and volleyed me in the testicles. He apologised after the game.’

Lawrence crossed the divide in south London to spend four years at Crystal Palace and counts the relegation escape of 2010 among his fondest football memories, along with a similar last-gasp relegation escape with Wycombe in 1999.

‘Roy Keane will probably shout out loud and say that’s not success and I agree but I didn’t win many league titles or trophies and the adrenaline rush when you push above the line on the last day is amazing.’

The Palace move, though, felt like a mistake at first. ‘The dressing room was at odds with itself, worse than anything I’d known, and it took Neil Warnock to come in and put his stamp on it,’ he says. ‘Neil came in on the first day, told the players to put their shinpads on and meet him on the pitch.

‘He condensed the pitch, moved the goals about 30 yards apart, threw in a ball and basically told us to kick the s*** out of each other. I imagine he thought he’d find out in 10 minutes who he needed to get rid of. And that’s the genius of the man.’

Lawrence’s playing career closed with two years at Gillingham in League Two and a spell at Whitehawk, winning the Isthmian League and promotion to what was then the Conference South.

‘I thrived on being told what to do and staying fit and healthy,’ says Lawrence. ‘Things deteriorated when I stopped playing for Whitehawk. I was 40 and no longer paid to play football, so I didn’t consider myself a footballer anymore.

‘When it stops, it stops very rapidly. The same as death happens very quickly at the end. There is no recreating the adrenaline rush of a matchday so I numbed the loss.’

His domestic life unravelled and he fell deeper into drink and drugs. ‘I was happy to be controlled by something. By anything. Cocaine and alcohol are pretty good at that.’

Lawrence has lived in the United States since 2016, working as TV analyst in Major League Soccer and living in Jersey City with a wonderful view of the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson River from his apartment.

‘I’d be doing a disservice to New York if I said that was a catalyst for my problems,’ he says. ‘New York was not my downfall. I was my downfall. I’d have found trouble in any far-flung island.

‘It was my own fault. A sad sort of demise. Through drink and drugs, I created my own little bubble where I didn’t have to think about anything, didn’t have to think about life or work or money.

‘Not because I had so much money. I had a great football career, but I didn’t have limitless money to spiral out of control buying mansions and Ferraris.’

Lawrence stayed clear of drugs for a while after his second brush with death in March 2021 but carried on drinking and eventually slipped back into the habit of taking cocaine again.

‘I fell back into it within six months, and fell back even deeper,’ he says. ‘I didn’t die again but my drug intake and frequency got worse.

‘I regret all of that. What it did to me financially, what it did to me domestically and what it did to me professionally. I thought I was living my life and getting away with it, but I was out of control.

‘I was incredibly depressed. Spending days in tears doing drugs and days in tears not doing drugs. Miserable and upset. My girlfriend and I sat across the dinner table last August, and she just said: “You have to stop, you can’t do this anymore.”‘

August 10 last year, by coincidence the opening weekend of the Championship season 2025-26, was his first day of true sobriety.

In the time since he has been learning to enjoy his life again. Learning to appreciate his family and his work again. Learning to love football again, reconnecting with his former clubs and team-mates and finding a warm embrace. Maybe even learning to respect himself again and value his playing career and achievements.

And, alive to tell the tale, he is writing an autobiography and writing it himself, without the help of a ghostwriter, finally finding a use for a degree in American literature more than 30 years after graduating.

‘Sobriety is the finality,’ says Lawrence. ‘There is no five years. No 10 years. No finish line. It’s the only thing.

‘I am sober as we speak today, I’ll be sober for the rest of today and tomorrow. I won’t preach to anybody else about how to live their lives, but I know I am an infinitely better human being sober.’