Unspoken truth about footballers

A professional footballer’s career lasts, on average, less than eight years. That is the players’ own union talking.¹

I have been a product manager for about eight years and I still feel like I am getting started. For a footballer that is the whole thing. Final whistle, and you are thirty-something with the rest of your life to fill.

We helped a group of former players in the UK build a product for that day. Before we designed anything, I went looking for the numbers. They were not the numbers I expected.

One in 8,333

Start with who gets to retire from football at all.

8,333 boys. One of them will play in the Premier League.

Tap anywhere to guess which one.

Each dot is a boy in organized youth football in England. The ratio is a journalist’s 2017 estimate: about 180 Premier League players from 1.5 million boys.

About 1.5 million boys play organized youth football in England at any one time. Around 180 of them will become Premier League players. That is 0.012%, or one dot in the picture above.²

It does not get much kinder closer to the top. Of 4,109 boys who came through the elite academies over six birth years, 97% never played a single minute in the Premier League, and 70% never got a professional contract of any kind.²

So the people we were building for had beaten absurd odds. This is the part nobody says out loud. Winning does not set you up.

The famous number

If you know one statistic about retired footballers, it is this one: three in five go bankrupt within five years of their last game.

It was in every article I opened. It comes from a charity for ex-players, which announced it in 2013 and gave its source as “our database.” A newspaper later traced the figure back to an insolvency firm, where it had meant something closer to “run into problems.” The head of the players’ union at the time put real bankruptcy at 10 to 20%.³

American football has the same story with bigger numbers. In 2009 a magazine reported that 78% of players were bankrupt or in financial trouble two years after retiring, quoting unnamed advisers. Economists then followed real players through real court records. Bankrupt after two years: 1.9%. After twelve: 15.7%.⁴

As a storyteller I was a little disappointed. As a person, relieved. Then I read the quieter numbers, the ones that never make a headline. They come from the global players’ union,⁵ the English one⁶ and a study of former players.⁷

Not sure what their second career will be

67%

Got no help preparing for it

54%

Hit financial difficulty within five years

52%

Saw their career end unexpectedly

46%

Report symptoms of depression or anxietyformer players

35%

Three different surveys, so read the direction rather than the decimals: 282 players in 33 countries (2021), former players in England (2018, sample size not published), and 219 former players asked about the previous four weeks (2015).

Not bankrupt. Just unprepared, which lasts longer.

The money is misunderstood too. The average wage at the very top is estimated at more than £60,000 a week. But the last time official figures were published for the fourth tier, in 2009–10, the average there was £38,844 a year.⁸ Most professional footballers are not rich. They are people in their thirties who earned a decent salary for a few years and have no CV.

Thirty-four

Players usually finish somewhere between thirty and thirty-four, and that is the lucky ones. Often they do not get to choose the day. In a study of retired players from the German top flight, 63% had been stopped by injury.⁹

Age 3426 years in football0 after it

The last match. Twenty-six years of football behind you, and most of a lifetime of something else in front.

An illustration in round numbers: an average professional career of under eight years, a last match in the early thirties, and a line that stops at 80 for no better reason than that it has to stop somewhere.

Everything to the left of that pin was organized by somebody else. When to train, what to eat, where to be on Saturday, what to work on this week. It has been that way since they were children.

That is why the money is not really the center of this. Researchers who studied 307 retired professionals in the UK found that the more a man’s sense of himself was built on being a footballer, the more likely he was to be depressed afterwards.¹⁰ You do not only lose the job. You lose the answer to “and what do you do?”

What they can do

The product we built with them starts from the opposite end. It does not ask what a player lacks. It uses an AI of its own to analyze what makes him unusually good, shows where those strengths are worth something outside football, and then gets practical: what he still needs before he qualifies, and how to actually land a job he would love.

If that sounds familiar, it is the idea we chased at Hattl. Stop reading the label. The label says “ex-footballer, no qualifications.” Underneath it is someone who has been coached in public since he was a child, has performed on a fixed schedule in front of thousands, and has had his mistakes replayed on television.

What years in this role train

Runs the room without owning it
Translates between the manager and the dressing room
Stays civil with referees, press and angry people

Where that is worth money

Team leadershipAccount and partner managementTeaching, coaching, youth work

Still missing

Management basics, on paper
Experience of leading people who are free to leave

An illustration of the idea, written for this article. It is not the product’s output: the real analysis was done player by player, not position by position.

How we built it

The product is really two products, and keeping them apart was the first decision.

One is a career discovery test. Anybody can take it, and most people do it sitting at a laptop. The other is an app just for athletes, which lives on the phone. The obvious move was one account and one login across both. We didn’t, because the test is a door anyone can walk through and the app is a club with a membership, and each needed to be marketed on its own. They are joined by a short code, letters and numbers you can remember long enough to type into your phone, and once it is in, your results are waiting inside the app.

Inside the app sits an AI coach, and most of the design work went into making it behave like a good mentor and not like a chatbot.

A timed question in the career discovery test, question 42 of 84, with a countdown — From the real app: the discovery test, the coach (including the moment it stops being a career coach), and jobs ranked by fit.

The AI coach chat. When a player writes that he feels lost, the coach answers with two buttons to call a support line or the emergency number — From the real app: the discovery test, the coach (including the moment it stops being a career coach), and jobs ranked by fit.

It speaks first. Nobody types “hi” to a blank screen, least of all someone who has just lost their job. So the coach opens the conversation, and its first question is whether you are still playing or have stopped. Retiring by choice and being retired by an injury are different griefs, and the coach should not greet them the same way.

Hard questions come with buttons. Money and injuries are the two subjects players least want to type about. Those questions arrive with ready answers to tap instead of an empty text box.

It knows what you need before it knows what to say. Every reply starts with a decision: does this person need a job, a mentor, something to do this week, or something to read or listen to. There is an order of preference, and if there is no good match at the top it falls to the next. Mentors are tagged by what they can actually help with, and a mentor with no tags is invisible to the coach.

Slow, but honest about it. The coach thinks before it answers, and thinking takes a few seconds. We tried making it faster, and it got faster by getting noticeably dumber. So we kept the brain and changed the wait: a rotating set of small, silly loading phrases that tell you something is happening. It is the labor illusion from my ticketing days, applied to a mentor that needs a moment to think.

Clubs get the other half. Clubs and associations bring their players in, so they get their own dashboard. It turns the whole squad’s progress into a few plain sentences, each with something to do about it.

Club dashboard insights: 78% of players stuck in the training phase with incomplete goals, just 2% of players have contacted a mentor, each with a suggested action — The clubs’ view. Every card is one pattern the AI found and one thing the club can do about it.

Jobs that are still open. Hand-picked vacancies go stale, and plenty of online listings close after the first hundred applicants. So job matches come from a live feed aggregated across job boards, not from somebody’s spreadsheet.

The world already values this. It just never says so in a job advert. When a survey asked 400 women in executive jobs about their past, 94% had played sport, and more than half of those in the C-suite had played at university level.¹¹

I do not say this about many projects, but we nailed this one.

The unspoken truth about footballers is not that they go broke. Mostly they do not. It is that at thirty-four, for the first time in their lives, somebody asks what they are good at, and nobody ever taught them how to answer. Every sprint and every pass of their working life was recorded. None of it is on a CV.

Sources and further reading