“If you read certain papers, maybe you already think you know me. Maybe you think you know my story, and what I care about. But do you really?”

England forward Raheem Sterling is regularly the target of the tabloids, be it for his tattoos, bling or lifestyle. But in a hard-hitting piece called ‘It was all a dream’ in The Players’ Tribune, the 23-year-old player has spoken about the criticism he often receives from the media and why it doesn’t bother him after the hardships he faced growing up.

He has written about how he rose from poor beginnings and traveled from Jamaica to England to become of the richest football players in the country, and why that he doesn’t think his life off the pitch has to be squeaky clean in order to succeed on it.

The UK tabloids have made a lot in the past of the lifestyle of the Manchester City player – who earns a reported £200,000 ($265,000) a week – but he says he no longer lets it get to him.

“If people want to write about my mum’s bathroom in her house, all I have to tell you is that 15 years ago, we were cleaning toilets in Stonebridge and getting breakfast out of the vending machine. If anybody deserves to be happy, it’s my mum. She came to this country with nothing and put herself through school cleaning bathrooms and changing bed sheets, and now she’s the director of a nursing home.

And her son plays for England,” he wrote.

Before leaving for Russia, he was widely-criticised by the media for having a tattoo of a gun on his leg, with some more hysterical commentators calling for him to be dropped from the squad.

He explained that it was a tribute to his father, who was shot dead in his birthplace of Jamaica when Sterling was just two years old.

“If you grew up the same way I grew up, don’t listen to what certain tabloids want to tell you,” said Sterling.

“They just want to steal your joy. They just want to pull you down.”

Sterling joined his mother in the UK aged five, after she had left him and his older sister with his grandmother in Kingston, so she could help their futures by studying in England.

But times were hard once they were reunited. He recounted his times in school and how an encounter with a social worker changed his life and put him on the path to football success.

Sterling, whose mother advised him to join Queens Park Rangers as a schoolboy in preference to London rivals Arsenal, also wrote about he used to get up at five in the morning and battle with his sister over chores at the hotel where their mum worked.

But with those difficult days behind them, he says both he and his mum can be proud of where they are now.

Read the full piece here.