What they did next (continued)

Back in the day – that’s my day, not anyone’s born after 1975 – one didn’t give much thought to what footballers did with their lives after they retired from the game.

I suppose in my mind’s eye I imagined that things didn’t change much for those in the era before mine (think Tom Finney, Stan Mortensen, Stanley Matthews and Nat Lofthouse) – they didn’t earn enough from the game to retire to mansions in Alderley Edge with gold-plated bathroom taps, neatly-laid-out football pitches in their back gardens and fleets of SUVs in their driveways.

Instead they probably went back to the factory or the trades they’d worked in before they became top footballers and then continued to travel to watch games at their old clubs on the same buses as the fans, just as they had done in their playing days.

They were ‘the peoples’ heroes’ and they were welcomed back to normal life by the people once they hung up their boots.

By my crucial football time, i.e. when I followed it as a sort of fan, there was a lot more money sloshing around the game [though of course nothing like there is today] the heroes of the hour were the likes of Bobby Moore, George Best, Colin Lee, Alan Hudson, Tony Currie and Peter Osgood. There was more of a hard man and drinking culture then – think ‘Chopper’ Harris (Chelsea), Norman Hunter (Leeds United) and Tommy Smith (Liverpool) in the former regard and okay Peter Osgood, Tony Adams (Arsenal) and Bryan Robson (Manchester United) in the latter – and a growing sense that, if you played your cards right, you might just make enough loot in your playing days and invested it wisely in things you enjoyed, you could enjoy a happy and comfortable retirement.

As a result a lot of footballers bought pubs or went into property because they seemed like interests at which, with the right people advising you, it was possible to make handsome money. Okay, down through history there have been sad stories of sportsmen (in no way is football a special bad case) who, for whatever reasons, have fallen upon hard times and ended up in alcoholism rehab, down and out, or just suffering from general post-elite career blues of some sort. It must be said here that ‘care for former players’ as provided by both the authorities and clubs throughout football has developed light years from where it was forty of fifty years ago.

In these modern times, in which the average top world footballer’s annual income seems to exceed the GDP of about 50% of the world’s countries, most fans assume that one day (when their heroes finally retire) they will continue to live without effort in a multi-millionaire’s ‘bubble’ in which everything of which they could possible conceive, or indeed covet, will be presented to them for free – or that, if it is not gratis, whatever king’s ransom it does cost will barely register with them and their bank accounts as the transaction goes through.

Just occasionally, however, one is granted an insight into a more ordinary and somehow heart-warming world in which – once their salad days are over – those who once tripped the light fantastic through a combination of natural ability and hard work then later return to roughly the same sort of world as the rest of us inhabit.

Here’s a link to an article by Thomas Burrows that appears today on the website of the – DAILY MAIL