PLANNING AHEAD
Cambridge United striker Robbie Simpson on his new business idea
FOOTBALL careers are short and players often fail to plan for the future – but Cambridge United striker Robbie Simpson aims to change all that.
The former Coventry City striker graduated from Loughborough University in 2007 with a sports science and mathematics degree and feels that more professional sports players need to have qualifications they can rely on when they finish playing full-time.
Encourage
Simpson is so passionate about the issue he is setting up a business for current sporting personnel and exstars from all areas of sport to plan for the future.
His new business is called Life After Professional Sport, or LAPS for short, and the 30year-old told The FLP: “It is a website-based business and the idea is that I’ll go to first teams, under-21 teams and youth teams and encourage players to sign up as members.
“They will register their interest in different job sectors and we will help them, while they are still playing, to gain qualifications that might help them in the long-run to get jobs in those sectors.
“We will help them write CVs and the website will have job advertisements on it as well, so they can look at what is available.”
The former Cambridge City man believes it’s vital that young players start to gain qualifications as early as possible.
“There are lots of under-21 teams, but there are proba- bly only two or three players that are going to make it in each team so I think it’s a massive issue,” he said.
“I know there are more and more people like myself and Matt Smith (Fulham), who are doing degrees while playing Non-League football, but it is still not enough.”
Despite already having some funding for his new business venture, Simpson says he has several potential investors lined up who are willing to help take LAPS to the next level.
Issue
The U’s forward believes he and his recruitment team will have everything up and running in September.
“I’m a footballer, so people might assume that this is just for footballers, but it is for other sports people as well,” he added.
“Having done the research, it is clearly a big issue for sports people to find jobs after they finish playing.”