Dele Alli considered retiring at 24 after Jose Mourinho dropped him at Tottenham

Dele Alli has confessed that he considered retiring from football aged just 24 when Jose Mourinho was his manager at Tottenham - but the coach did apologise for calling him 'f***ing lazy'.

The infamous training ground exchange between Alli and Mourinho was featured in the Amazon All or Nothing documentary about Tottenham's 2019-20 season.

Former England star Alli's career has since unravelled with the 27-year-old spending last season on loan at Turkish club Besiktas from Everton.

Alli has revealed in an interview with Gary Neville on The Overlap that he checked into rehab for six weeks this summer after becoming addicted to sleeping pills.

And he also revealed he considered quitting the sport when Mourinho was in charge because he was in such a 'bad place.'

He told Neville: It's hard to pinpoint one exact moment [when he started to feel things weren't right].

'Probably the saddest moment for me, was when Mourinho was manager, I think I was 24.

'I remember there was one session, like one morning I woke up and I had to go to training - this is when he'd stopped playing me - and I was in a bad place.

'I remember just looking in the mirror - I mean it sounds dramatic but I was literally staring in the mirror - and I was asking if I could retire now, at 24, doing the thing I love.

'For me, that was heartbreaking to even have had that thought at 24, to want to retire.

'That hurt me a lot, that was another thing that I had to carry.'

Alli added: 'That period, I was partying a lot, I was having a lot of parties. The reality of what they [the tabloids] say is not the reality.

'They were calling me a 'party boy' and all this before I was doing any of this. So, I think people's perception of me was a lot different to the reality of what I was living.

'And then it got to a point where that [partying] happened, and I was in a bad place.'

In the same interview, Alli has given his side of the story about his feud with Mourinho after the coach told him: 'You're a f***ing lazy guy. I 'm going to be a pain in the a** on you and you are lucky, you are lucky. When I am a pain in then a** it is a good thing.'

Alli told Neville: 'That lazy comment, people love to bring that up, that interview obviously was on Amazon. He called me lazy - that was the day after recovery day.

'A week later, he apologised for me for calling me lazy because he'd seen me actually train and play.

'But that wasn't in the documentary, and no one spoke up about that because it was only me and him.

'In the team meeting, he called me lazy but then one-on-one, I think it was on the pitch, he apologised for it.

'I didn't think anything of it at the time because I know myself - I'm not lazy.

'What you see sometimes isn't the way it really is. I think, especially now with social media and all these things, we can really portray something that isn't real.

'After that, I think people definitely tried to use that, for some other decisions.

'I think other coaches, maybe, for other reasons why I wasn't playing, they stuck to that - lazy one - because it was kind of an easy, easy one to use.

'And the problem was probably more than that, I think.'