Preparing players for life after football should begin befor

Iprefer to leave football before football leaves me,” David Villa said this week. Spain’s all-time top ww88 scorer once claimed he would play until he was 55 if he could. In the end he will make it to 38. For the past six seasons Villa has signed annual deals, delaying the inevitable, competitive as ever, but no more: he has announced his retirement. Over 19 years he has scored 390 goals and played 716 games; he has four left. Five, if Vissel Kobe reach the Japanese cup final. And then he will lead a new football club, founded in Queens, New York.

Villa has prepared for retirement. “There are things I couldn’t give time to before; I can now,” he said. “It’s going to be fun, that’s the most important thing.” He has things to do for sure. And that, the former player, coach and director Jorge Valdano tells the Observer, is vital. “If I gave one piece of advice to a player retiring tomorrow, I’d say: ‘When you wake up, have something to do,’” he says. “Something, anything. It doesn’t matter what. Anything that helps you feel useful. Because the worst thing is the void.”



Some days Damian Duff would go and play, alone. “I feel a bit of a weirdo doing it [but] I went to the local Astropark for a little five-a-side, a kickabout on my own,” he told Graham Hunter’s Big Interview. “I’ll go and kick the ball against the wall for 10 minutes. Get my dose.” Zinedine Zidane said after retiring: “I miss the adrenaline but not the rest,” yet the advisory role he had was already starting to feel empty, which is why he coached https://www.w88thais.com/latest-entrance-w88-mobile-android-ios/ .

Eric Cantona retired at 30. “I was young [enough] to return to play and I didn’t want to,” he says. “To avoid that temptation, I didn’t watch football for years. It’s like a drug and a dealer: if your dealer’s next to you, it’s harder. Sport is a drug. Your body misses the adrenaline. Physiologically it’s difficult to stop, then it becomes psychologically very difficult.” Is there another drug? “Yes, having another passion.”

For Cantona that was acting but it could not be as big as football – “an obsession” – and some never find anything else. “Some players, when they no longer play, feel they don’t exist,” he says.

It is not only football that leaves you; it is everything, a part of you. Valdano says: “Footballers never talk about the end of their careers, for the same reason human beings don’t talk about death: it frightens them.”

1:32
 David Villa to retire: a look back at Spain's most prolific goalscorer – video report
Retirement from any job can provoke loss, a lack of identity. Elite sport exacerbates that, so complete is the dedication, and unlike many jobs football is one workers love – “you play a game for living, which is a way of prolonging your childhood‚” Valdano says – and which constructs a community perhaps no occupation can match. It is a world in which players do little for themselves, and one that ends early, with years ahead of them. For some it is sudden, a shock. Often they are unprepared w88 line .


It is said that sportspeople die twice, the first time on retirement. And that death is the harder, the Brazilian footballer Falcão once remarked, because it is the one you have to live with for the rest of your life.

“I was trying to process the fact that I was never going to play again and I couldn’t,” Clarke Carlisle explains in his documentary on mental health. “Because that was me, I was Clarke The Footballer. I couldn’t see the reason anybody would be proud of me. I’m going to take all these pills and kill myself because now without football they’re going to see me for what I am – and that was nothing. I sat on the bench, popped the pills and waited for it to happen. What a fucking idiot.”

Quite apart from the physical impact – a FifPro study found that 34% of former players over 40 have osteoarthritis – there is a mental issue. A 2018 State of Sport survey found half of former professional athletes have mental wellbeing concerns, retirement bringing a sense of “loss” and “regret”. “It’s not unusual for players to speak of feelings of mourning and grief,” said Simon Taylor from the Professional Players’ Federation.

Other research suggested that two fifths of footballers were bankrupt within five years and a third had divorced inside a year. “There can be a loss of material resources but perhaps hardest are the symbolic resources,” says Dr David Lavallee from Abertay University. “The stronger and more exclusive the identification with the role of footballer, the greater risk of retirement-related problems.”