Jack Collison is reminiscing about the start of his obsession with football. He remembers that he always had a ball at his feet, whether he was going to the shops or to the park, and that he would dribble around the cushions at home, pretending he was Paul Scholes.

Chelsea were his team and he idolised Gianfranco Zola. “I was that kid playing football 24/7, whether it was volleying a ball against my mum’s walls or knocking her vases over,” Collison says. “I put a golf ball through the front window once.”

Collison is looking and sounding a little sheepish as he confesses to these sins and this should be a heartwarming tale of how he saw his dream of becoming a professional footballer come true. But this is a story with a twist as jarring as the one that led to the former West Ham United midfielder dislocating his right kneecap against Wigan Athletic in March 2009, a cruel and desperately unlucky injury that changed the course of a career that was heading in a different direction at the time. “People have this vision of footballers having an easy life,” Collison says and he is about to debunk that theory.

Collison is 26 and he should be approaching his prime. Alan Curbishley gave him his debut for West Ham in a 2-0 defeat at Arsenal on New Year’s Day in 2008 and Collison started to establish himself as a prominent member of the first team when Zola, his childhood hero, was appointed manager later that year.

Yet injuries have taken their toll on a player whose ability meant that he was once linked with a move to Arsenal, and Collison has not played a competitive match since last May. West Ham released him with a heavy heart at the end of last season and although Ipswich Town handed him a short-term contract in September, he injured his left knee in a practice match and was unable to make a single appearance for Mick McCarthy’s side. He was released in December and Collison now finds himself training on his own every day, pushing his body and his mind as he looks for a new club. He has had a couple of offers but he is prepared to be patient, continue his fitness work and wait until the summer before committing to anything. It is a lonely and frustrating existence.

Collison is not the kind of person who wants sympathy. He has a fiancee, watching The Lion King with his two-year-old daughter, Lucia, puts a smile on his face, he has a solid group of people around him and he is keeping himself busy. He has just opened the Jack Collison Soccer School with an old friend, plans to take his Uefa B licence in the summer and reveals that he is studying for a degree in sports writing and broadcasting.

Yet when he recalls how excited he was when he made his debut against Arsenal, how Curbishley caught him and James Tomkins in the lift on the morning of the game and told them that they were on the bench, it is hard not to feel sorry for him. “I remember going to warm up down the touchline and the Arsenal fans didn’t have a clue who we were and we got quite a bit of stick: ‘Oh, you two look like hairdressers,’” Collison says. “We had a great set of barnets. We quite enjoyed that and before I knew it Freddie Ljungberg was going off and it was: ‘Right, you’re going on, enjoy it ... try and get near Fàbregas if you can.’ I didn’t get anywhere near him.”

When Zola replaced Curbishley in September 2008, Collison became a fixture in the side and on 19 November 2008 he made his debut for Wales in a 1-0 victory away to Denmark, the first of 17 caps.

On 1 March 2009, he scored West Ham’s winner in a 1-0 victory over Manchester City. It was a fine goal, a beautifully judged lob over Shay Given, but the injury came three days later. West Ham were closing in on another three points, this time away to Wigan, when Collison controlled a clearance from Robert Green on his chest and collapsed in agony by the right touchline. There was no one near him but his studs seemed to get caught in the turf, causing his knee to buckle and give way. It was a freak accident. “I think that was a big turning point,” Collison says. “Ever since then I’ve had to be very careful with myself. At the time, I was flying and loving my football. I was enjoying playing under my hero as a kid and the boys were doing well in the league.”

He returned two months later, but it was too soon. “Injuries are part of the game, but it was a serious injury,” Collison says. “Looking back, that was a massive mistake. It’s hard to tell a 20-year-old kid you can go one way about it and you’ll be back in a couple of months, or you go the long way, have the surgery and miss over a year of football.

“I think it’s hard. I was 20 and I was playing week-in, week-out in the Premier League. At the end of the day, it’s all in the past. It’s happened now. It’s hard to tell someone they should stop playing and no one said maybe you think should about your future rather than trying to play again in a couple of months time.”

It was a difficult time for Collison, both on and off the pitch. Tragedy stuck at the start of the following season when his father, Ian, was killed in a motorcycle accident while he was on his way to watch Collison play against Tottenham Hotspur. Collison found out after the game and two days later he walked off in tears at the end of a League Cup match against Millwall at Upton Park.

He continued to play, but his knee was bothering him and he underwent surgery in March 2010. He was out for 14 months, Zola was sacked and Avram Grant took West Ham down. The game that sealed their fate, a 3-2 defeat at Wigan in May 2011, was Collison’s first start of the season.

“There’s a different way for an injured player to be,” he says. “Though you’re around the boys a lot, it’s very lonely. People would try and talk to you and build you up, but you need to get in the right mindset and realise you’re on your own now. This is what I’m going to do, this is what it’s going to take. You have to focus so much energy on coming back. I had a lot of good people around me, but they’re not the ones going in watching the boys training and doing the hours in the gym. Then you’ve got treatment, then you’ve got to go down the swimming pool and then spend all night icing your knee. It’s very lonely. Times like that aren’t easy.”

Collison pauses for a moment and searches for the right words. “It’s heartbreaking,” he says, softly and without a hint of melodrama.

“One of my most difficult moments was when my agent came to me pick me up after my operation,” he says. “I’d been in for two days and they said I should stay, but I just wanted to get home. I was in the back of the car and I was nearly in tears, I was in so much pain on the way back. I just wanted to get home and start my recovery away from the hospital. Over a 14-month period there was lots of progress and then a setback. Two steps forward, one step back. You think you’re getting close and you’re still a mile off. You get outside and something else crops up. It’s tough.

“I kept a blog every day, of every single bit of treatment that I did, from day one to 14 months later. I’ve got about three or four books of that. I was really focused about getting back.”

Sam Allardyce replaced Grant, and Collison had a productive season as West Ham battled their way out of the Championship. He scored both goals when they beat Cardiff City 2-0 in the first leg of their play-off semi-final and played in the 2-1 victory over Blackpool in the final, even though he was struggling with a shoulder injury. “It was a bit of a patch-up job,” he says. “I had a jab on the day of the game. I was fully strapped up. I could hardly move to be honest but there was no way I wasn’t going to go out there; you would have had to shoot me in both legs.

“Near the end I was dribbling with the ball. I got cramp in both legs and I fell over on my shoulder. I was in agony. Kevin Nolan picked me up and said: ‘What are you doing?’ But Winston Reid was there to mop up. Then I fell over the boards when we were celebrating.”

West Ham were back in the Premier League but his knee was bothering him again. He missed the first three months of the season and when he scored West Ham’s goal in a 5-1 defeat at Arsenal in January 2013, he ran straight to the bench and celebrated with the physio, Andy Rolls.

Yet his form was patchy and West Ham decided to let him go at the end of last season. Collison’s response? He said farewell to supporters by publishing a 2,800-word open letter on West Ham’s website and the feedback was so positive that it made him want to see whether he could work in the media one day.

“I’m going to be picking your brains,” he jokes. “I’ve always been interested in writing and the radio, because obviously it’s something that comes with football. I’ve always kept blogs and diaries, but it’s been more private. After I wrote the letter to the West Ham fans, which took me a while, I had a lot of feedback. I got an email from the PFA, who have been fantastic, about their sports writing degree, so I thought let’s have a crack at it and see how it goes. I’m about four or five months into it.

“It’s a bit harder than I expected. The workload’s really gone up and we’ve got a little group of 10 of us. It’s ex-pros through the PFA. Chris Iwelumo’s doing it and a few others. We’ve just started doing small pieces, little articles. We’ve been working on interview techniques and then in the summer it moves into the television and radio side of it.”

Collison loves to write. “I found that it was a good way to sometimes let off a bit off steam,” he says. “I sometimes wrote about my games, it just depended on what mood I was in. Sometimes I would go ages without writing and sometimes I’d be writing every day. It might be a little paragraph or sometimes I might really get into one and get all my feelings and thoughts out on the page.

“I’ve never published anything. The letter to the West Ham fans is the only thing I’ve put out there. I felt that was quite therapeutic. It was nice to get everything out and close the chapter on a long time at West Ham.

“I’ve got pages and pages of stuff on my computer. I’m actually working on a book with Kit Carson, who used to be my youth coach at Peterborough and Cambridge. We’re working on something at the moment, to try and bring some of the stuff together and see where we go with that. I’ve got everything, from debuts, from bad games, from coming back from injury, from being injured.”

The soccer school has also given Collison a buzz. “One of my friends who I played with at Cambridge, Russell Short, we were just having a conversation one day,” he says. “I had a lot of time on my hands and he’s a semi-pro now and we just thought it would be great to set it up. I know how fantastic it was for me as a youngster to go to something like that. They have the opportunity to get trained by ex-pros and I do as much as I can. I have David Blackmore, an ex-West Ham academy goalkeeper, coming in with the goalies. They just enjoy their football, which I think every kid wants.

“They’re normal schoolkids. It’s not to find the best players. We’re in a great position where if we find a little gem we can help them out. It would be amazing. Imagine having a kid coming from your soccer school going on to a pro club and then doing well. But the three days we have had so far, I got so much enjoyment out of it. It’s such a great feeling seeing how happy the kids were and how much they were enjoying it.”

Collison’s main target, however, is to find a new club. He feels strong and he knows his body now. “I’ve spent a lot of time researching,” he says. “If you wanted to talk about knees, I could probably talk about them for 10 hours.”

And despite everything that has happened, he has remained positive. “I don’t think I have any choice,” Collison says. “If ever I have a day where I feel down, I just go and look at my daughter. She’s my first child. It’s so great watching her grow and her personality grow.”