Paul Lake's career as a footballer was cut so short, so mangled by misfortune, we will never know how far the game would have taken him, but what we can say for certain is that the ability and drive were always there to let us believe it would have been a journey worth following.

There are not too many footballers who have nutmegged Gheorghe Hagi. Or given Paul Gascoigne, in his pomp, a run for his money. Gazza, gearing up for Italia 90, was in the crowd for one of Lake's first matches for England Under-21s and bounded over afterwards to congratulate him for his performance. "Don't get too good, mind," he told the younger man. "I'm not having you nicking my fucking place."

By that stage Lake was already being spoken about as a future England captain. At Manchester City, he was the most cherished young asset, the classic local boy done good, born a few months after they had last won the league, now living the dream of every schoolboy who has longed to play for the club he supports. Lake had been exceptional all through his youth. "I didn't quite know how, or why, I found football so easy. I just did, and that was that."

But football can be brutal sometimes. I'm Not Really Here (Century, £14.99) is the raw, sometimes unsparing and frequently moving account of how Lake's career was shipwrecked and how a man with the world at his feet ended up as one of football's hard-luck stories.

The injury that footballers dread the most is the snapped cruciate knee ligament – and Lake ruptured the one in his right leg on three different occasions. His life became a dark journey, an endless slog of rehab, comebacks, breakdowns and callous disappointments until, finally, after almost years of battling with his own body the lights went out on his career and he was forced into early retirement. He was 27.

What people did not realise was that, by then, Lake was suffering from clinical depression, and it is this side of I'm Not Really Here that makes it far from the run-of-the-mill football autobiography. The police found him standing on a motorway bridge one day, leaning over the rails. He was not contemplating jumping but Lake's life was in meltdown, and if he had not sought professional help it was threatening to spiral even further out of control. He ended up in the Priory, so worried that word would get out he carried a spare cheque in his pocket so if he was recognised he could make up a story about being there for a charity presentation.

It is an epic, harrowing and gripping story of a man living, as the front cover confesses, "a life of two halves" and it is maybe because the book is ghosted by his wife, Joanne, that he is able to provide such an unflinching account of how dark and tormented the days became once that joy – the buzz, the adrenaline, the fix – of running out on a pitch was removed.

In his mid-20s, what should have been his peak years, Lake shut himself away from the world. He found the cinema a place of sanctuary, so he "could binge on Coke and popcorn and not have to speak to another human being for a couple of hours". Attending matches at Maine Road became a tribulation he could barely face. "Wouldn't mind your job, Lakey, being paid to do fuck all," someone guffawed at one game. The man who stuck the ball through Hagi's legs would make his excuses and slope off to the toilet for five minutes' respite, holding his head in his hands. A voice in his head would sneer: "Just look at you, you're a mess, a joke." After so long out of the side, he felt embarrassed about the annual ritual of the team photograph – "like a spare part, like I was gatecrashing a private function".

Lake is 42 now, still prominently involved at the club as an ambassador for City in the Community, and can tell this story after coming out the other side. What is remarkable is that his love affair with the club never faded. Remarkable because Lake was, at different times, neglected, ignored and handled so badly that, after 15 operations, he would be entitled to have a grudge even worse than the knee he describes at one point as "like a stone in a beer can".

Lake's first marriage crumbled. He had to move back in with his parents because losing playing bonuses meant he could not keep up with his mortgage. Other players with cruciate injuries travelled to the United States for operations with specialists in that field but Peter Swales, City's chairman of the time, supposedly did not want to foot the bill. When Swales finally backed down, Lake recalls the words of the surgeon in Los Angeles. "If I'd seen you straight away, you'd have been back playing by now." After the surgery, City's physio flew back to Manchester in business class. Lake, on crutches, was booked out a few days later in the cheap seats with "my leg folded up like a concertina". He arrived in Manchester in tears and in agony, his knee so contorted he could barely make it through the terminal.

And yet Lake never comes across as embittered – or even close. This is not a book about settling old scores – Swales, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the only guy who gets a real coating, but only in passing – but the story of a man who fell hopelessly in love with the game of football and, in particular, Manchester City, and has had to live with the consequences.

And there were highs too. Plenty of them. Lake belonged to that exciting generation of players who won promotion under Mel Machin and provided one of Sir Alex Ferguson's lowest moments in what is known in Manchester as simply "the 5-1". The 20-year-old was interviewed on radio after that game and asked what was the secret for the win. "I ate raw meat for breakfast," he replied.

Lake could play at right-back, centre-half or in midfield. An all-rounder, he even had sporadic appearances as a second striker, and on the left. He was City's captain at 21 and called up to the England training camp for Italia 90. "I used to ask for £10m when clubs asked about him," Howard Kendall, City's then manager says, "but that was in the days when clubs couldn't afford that sort of money."

Where he would have ended up, we can only guess. If things had been different, if the treatment had been superior, or if Lake simply had better luck, it may have been very different. If, if, if. It could, though, have been one of the great football careers of the past two decades. Even so, Lake still left City supporters with enough memories for him to be revered as a club legend. Now he and Joanne have provided one of the outstanding football autobiographies of that time.

I'm Not Really Here is published on 4 August