Dide is providing a voice for elite footballers and young people everywhere

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The music video for ‘Cold City’ – the recent single from anonymous rapper, claimed-to-be current Premier League footballer Dide – opens with aerial shots of the architecturally striking Alexandra & Ainsworth Estate in North London. Panning down to ground level, over a menacing, keys-led, drill-informed beat, it follows a teenage boy as he navigates being with his single mother and the uncompromising turns and temptations life on the estate can bring.

Interspersed throughout, the video cuts to the masked rapper dressed in designer garb riding in the back seat of a 4x4 Rolls-Royce, then moving around a luxury apartment. He spits with relentless flow: “I live in the hills like Drizzy or Cole / The pain in my heart has never been told / My family warm, my city is cold” and “The few they had left / They’re closing the clubs / And opening jails for the youth.”

The three-minute video, and the raw track that it accompanies, is a window into the dichotomy of Dide and the contradictions of his world. Nobody knows who he is, not even his teammates, but his music points towards a young, Black, working-class boy from inner-city London who has found riches in the top tier of English football, yet remains deeply connected to his roots.

“‘Cold City’ is just a summary of what I’ve experienced living in London and being in environments in London,” Dide says through his distinctive black mask, adorned with intricate black roses from chin to crown. “And some of what my friends and peers have been through. I think London is an amazing place, but the not so glamorous parts of being in a city – that song was just another way of expressing that.”

We’ve joined him today in a plush music studio in the capital, where he’s recording music for an upcoming project due for later in the year.

Purportedly, it will feature some exciting collaborations, which he is keeping tight-lipped about. With vinyl lining the walls, a huge mixing desk in the control room and a single microphone draped from the ceiling, it’s a picture-perfect recording setting, and a space Dide moves comfortably through. It’s also a place he finds creative inspiration in, with the studio being where he first started laying down his own verses. “It all came really naturally, the first time I went to the studio it was with my friends after training, just chilling,” he recalls. “And yeah, turned into what it was – there was no real thought process to it, it was just fun at that point and another way of expressing myself.”

Those early sessions led to the release of his melancholic, April 2023 debut ‘Thrill’, which instantly raised eyebrows and ears from the worlds of music and sport, and his music has since racked up millions of streams. Instantly, “Who is Dide?” became the question on the internet’s lips, as fans and armchair detectives got to work. The likes of Marcus Rashford, Arsenal forwards Eddie Nketieh and Bukayo Saka, former Crystal Palace winger Wilfried Zaha, Cardiff City winger Sheyi Ojo (currently on loan at KV Kortrijk in Belgium) have been mentioned as possibilities, while more galaxy-brained theories have even thrown up Manchester United centre back Harry Maguire.

‘Who is Dide’ is also the title of his debut EP – an eight-tracker released in September – and the record’s opening song, which clips broadcast samples of media figures speculating over his identity while backed by a cinematic string intro. His opening line: “Look you all want to know who Dide is / I’m that baller taking the piss.”

It’s a self-aware, playful rebuttal to the speculation that has dominated the Dide narrative that he feels has come to overshadow the music – which once you move past the fact that he’s a famous footballer, is layered, full of intricate wordplay, and truly cold. “It’s hard to break through the barriers. Especially with me, obviously people want to know who’s behind the mask,” he says, with each square inch of skin masked, sleeved or gloved up. He’s softly spoken and considered – a far cry from the bombastic images rappers usually conjure. “There’s a lot of distractions from the music and for me, my main goal is to release music that relates to people, that people can feel inspiration from and can be able to be looked at in a positive light.”

As the song progresses, the rapper skilfully moves away from the questions over his identity, drawing listeners to hear out the breadth of his range. Fun football references are plenty, delivered with bravado: “I grew up on Becks, now I’m actually him”, “I could have got left way back, like [Manchester United defender] Luke Shaw”, and football and sport crop up regularly throughout his music. Like almost every other rapper, he pens bars about the world around him.

In the internet era, sport, music and popular culture are becoming increasingly intertwined, with UK rap forerunners Skepta, Dave, CASISDEAD, AJ Tracey, OFB and others’ lyric books being littered with Premier League references. But music also plays a big role within football, and players are music fans, too. Manchester City’s attacking midfielder and the Premier League’s Ibiza raver Jack Grealish went viral last summer with a to-camera, in-the-club rendition of Dave and Burna Boy’s ‘Location’, and behind the scenes, tunes are blared out everywhere, Dide explains “When we’re in the changing room, everyone’s got their playlists, they’re playing music and talking about new songs and who’s the best rapper and all this sort of stuff. So music is definitely a big part of the football and entertainment industry altogether – it’s a massive thing in our culture and long may it continue.”

In his first ever on-screen interview behind the mask, which he gave with Sky News, Dide described himself as a “voice for all football players”. It’s an interesting thought, that some of the country’s most recognisable people – who are offered the platform to speak to hundreds of thousands of adoring fans each weekend on camera via interviews and press conferences – would need someone to be a voice for them. But football is a high-pressure environment, with top level players facing a level of scrutiny that most of us could barely imagine, and an inherent need to keep standards up until the day they retire.

One bad game or training practice – even a media comment that their manager deems out of line – could see them dropped from the team or sold off to another club. “You know, when you work a normal 9-to-5 job, you finish your work at 5 o’clock, you go home [and] you switch off – you’re with your family and stuff like that. But with football it’s ongoing. When you finish training, you’re still thinking about the last game and thinking about how you improve – it’s a never-ending feeling.” The mask, then, gives him the rarefied space to be able to speak frankly into the microphone. Despite having a head made up of black roses, he gives a human face to players. He raps about the pressure they’re under, reminding fans who “think that we’re robots” that, in fact, “we all human”. Even though his peers and footballing contemporaries don’t know who is behind the mask, he’s had positive feedback. “I think everyone respects the fact that this is a good thing for footballers, and being able to find someone that can express how all of us are really feeling is a positive thing – everyone’s supporting that.”

Watching Premier League players execute at elite levels week in, week out, it’s easy to forget that footballers are more than just the athletes who score worldies from 30 yards outside the box or who make game saving goal line clearances – that they are individuals with their own cultural tastes, pastimes, families and emotions. There’s a strand of discourse that insinuates players should be dedicating their entire waking existences to becoming better at football. If they are papped taking part in extracurricular activities, pundits can be quick to criticise them for a lack of focus, or “professionalism”.

For Dide, making music is his way of winding down and looking after himself away from the pitch, but also expressing his personality. “In order to maintain that high level of performance, you do need other ways of releasing and expressing yourself – for other people it might be playing golf or going to the bar or whatever. Music has always been that for me, it’s always been a form of therapy – [I’d listen to it] after training, at home. When I’m bored I prefer to go to the studio and make music.” But beyond sport, Dide’s most powerful moments come when he interrogates the world around us all. Many of his lyrics are politically barbed – from the critique of the closing down youth clubs in ‘Cold City’ to jabs at politicians in ‘Thrill’: “Fuck being rich I’ll rather help the poor / Government’s got no remorse / And Rishi Sunak couldn’t help the cause.”

Towards the latter stages of ‘Who is Dide?’ the rapper takes on the titular question: “Dide’s a small Black yout with a dream so big but his dad’s in court / Dide’s the Asian one with the tech so clean but his knees fell short / Dide’s the one that left all young ‘cause he didn’t have full support.” He explains: “It’s things that me, as an individual, stands for. I’m very aware of what’s happening in the current climate and I have a voice, just like everyone else has a voice, and I want to express that in my music.”

He isn’t, then, just a football player who raps, or a voice for footballers. He’s also a voice for the younger generation left behind by decreasing living standards, the UK’s rental crisis, and ailing public services. So who is Dide? Is he Saka or Zaha? His closing lines of the track speaks the loudest: “I said Dide is me / I said Dide is you.”

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