The Homesick Sports Stars

Earlier this month, rugby league star Sam Tomkins secured an early release from his contract with New Zealand Warriors. The Englishman's original deal ran through 2016, but he will now depart a year early, at the conclusion of the 2015 campaign. The break up was mutual and not related to Tomkins' ability as a player – he is England's leading try-scorer and cost New Zealand Warriors a world record fee when they signed him in 2013. The problem lies several thousand miles away in North West England. Tomkins is homesick.

More young people than ever are leaving their homes for work and education. Often, the adjustment to a new life can be extremely difficult; not all of them stay the course. But when they are sportsmen or women, the challenges are different. They have to adjust, but they're doing so in the public eye. And the public can cruel.

"I miss home in ways I never thought I would," admitted Tomkins after his impending split with the Warriors was announced. "I never imagined it would reach this point.

"This is a great club and I can't say enough about the coaching staff. I love being with the lads and it's a brilliant country to live in."

But that was not enough. Tomkins has close links with the English town of Wigan and its rugby league club, also named the Warriors, having first joined their feeder side as a nine-year-old. His family moved from Chorley to Wigan to support his career, a decision that bore fruit as he became a regular in the senior team and the national side.

However, it would also seem that it created extremely strong ties that Tomkins has struggled to cope without.

"He came here excited about testing himself in the NRL and also experiencing living in a new country but, in the end, Sam has found it too much of a challenge being away from home," NZ Warriors managing director Jeff Doyle told the club's official website.

"While we have talked with him and tried to work through it he has now come back to us to ask for a release at the end of the season. It's disappointing that it has come to this but reluctantly we have accepted there is no option but to allow Sam to return to England."

Tomkins has since confirmed that he will re-join Wigan for next season.

He is by no means the first sportsperson to deal with homesickness. Some have done so publicly, while it seems certain that many more have suffered in silence. If anything, Tomkins should be praised for his honesty; better to be open than to hang around, grow depressed, and cash a cheque at the end of each month. And if it helps someone else who is facing the problem to seek help, so much the better.

Perhaps the most famous homesick sports star is the World Cup-winning footballer Jesus Navas. However, to simplify the Spanish winger's issues to 'homesickness' would be reductive. Though seemingly over the worst of his problems now, in the past Navas has suffered chronic homesickness that caused anxiety and even seizures. Clearly his problems went further than simply missing home; at one stage it looked like severely restricting his career potential.

And Navas did not develop homesickness after spending a few seasons abroad. Until the relatively late age of 27, he played for his local club; in this respect he was fortunate to be born in Los Palacios y Villafranca, a town half an hour up the road from La Liga heavyweights Sevilla.

Navas joined the club as a youth and broke into the first team while still in his teens. This in itself was not a major issue. But when he was selected for the Spanish under-21 side, his problems began to manifest. He lasted only a few days at his first training camp before a severe bout of homesickness saw him depart early. On a subsequent occasion, he pulled out of the team before even leaving for the camp. He even struggled when Sevilla travelled away for training.

This stymied Navas' career. By 2007 he had helped Sevilla win two UEFA Cups, the UEFA Super Cup, and the Copa del Rey. Under normal circumstances he'd have left the club, either for Spanish giants Real Madrid or Barcelona, or a top-four side in England. But with Navas' continuing homesickness and anxiety, this seemed impossible.

International responsibilities continued to affect him. Navas received a call-up to the senior Spanish national side, but the thought of travelling far from home left him depressed, and he announced he was retiring from international football before he had even earned his first cap.

In 2009 Navas began to seek help. Having missed out on the 2008 European Championships – which Spain won – he was determined to make the squad for the 2010 World Cup, and so ended his premature international retirement.

"I had reached a point that made me realise I needed to put up a fight from my side," said Navas about his attempts to overcome the inability to travel.

In 2009 he ended his international exile. The following year he was part of the squad that won the World Cup, then helped the Spanish retain their European Championship title in 2012.

Navas finally left Seville in 2013, joining Manchester City for an initial fee of £17m. He was already 27 by this stage, making the move at least a few years later than expected for a player of his calibre. Having already earned a Premier League winner's medal, Navas' story seems to have a happy ending.

But even with the move to City, efforts were being made to help smooth the transition. His elder brother Marco was a Spanish lower-league journeyman without a club in the summer of 2013. Shortly after Jesus joined City, Marco made the unlikely move to English League 2 side Bury. It's easy to connect the dots: the younger Navas needed all the familiar faces possible, and Bury is just 10 miles from Manchester. Marco only ever played two games for The Shakers.

A sportsperson doesn't need to cross the planet to become homesick. It can occur from moving from one part of a country to another. Northumberland-born Kat Copeland won Olympic Gold in 2012, claiming the Women's lightweight double sculls with Sophie Hosking. However, she had contemplated quitting the sport two years earlier after becoming homesick while training in the south.

Copeland and Hosking struggle to come to terms with their gold medal success

"I had a pretty low year. I moved away, I wasn't happy, but then I came home [to Northumberland] and had all my friends with me and I started to love training again," she recalled in 2012. Copleand had moved just a few hundred miles; she lived in the same country and could be home by train in a few hours. Yet homesickness still threatened to hamper her sporting career.

Navas and Copeland both overcame their problems to reach the top of their respective sports, while Tomkins will no doubt be among the stars of the Super League when he returns to Britain. However, in some cases, homesickness has been enough to end an athlete's career. Zephaniah Skinner is an Aboriginal Australian who grew up in the tiny village of Noonkanbah. A talented Aussie Rules footballer, he was signed by Melborune-based Western Bulldogs in 2010. He was rated highly, but two years later he quit the team and the sport – at least at a professional level – to return home.

"When you're busy you don't worry about anything, but it's that time when you go home … when I'd go back home to the house I lived in in Melbourne, it's just that you feel lonely," Skinner told ABC last year.

Skinner was also affected by the fact that in Melbourne you "can't even see the stars at night," and the comparatively cold weather. It would also be remiss to ignore the cultural differences: Skinner is an Aborigine who grew up in a rural town of just a few hundred people; Melbourne is a vast metropolis with a population of more than four million.

Skinner struggled to cope in Melbourne (though his back-flipping abilities were never in questions).

"I got to one stage, I just [didn't] want to be there anymore," he said. "I don't know what it is about home, I just wanted to go back. It's like, when I'm in Noonkanbah, I want to get out of this place, but when you go to another place, home will always call out to you."

Skinner – like Tomkins, Navas and many others – was adjusting to an entirely different world from the one he'd grown up in. But, like many sportspeople who leave home in pursuit of success, he was being forced to do so in the public eye.

If homesickness affects an athlete mentally, that is more than likely to follow them into their sport. But the fans do not see a person who misses their family and friends, or who is struggling to adjust to an alien way of life – they see an underperforming athlete. And sometimes they give them stick for how they're playing without considering the reasons behind the performance.

Sam Tomkins was brave to admit to his homesickness. It reminds us that athletes are people – quite often very young people – who face the same problems anyone else would when leaving home for the first time.