Three football stages

FOOTBALL has three key stages for a player: development, performance and the grand closing or departure of one’s career. Footballers face many different challenges in the preparation of and during the transition to the post-playing career. As a consequence of insufficient proactive support mechanisms during the athletic career and/or inadequate coping with these challenges, a high number of retired elite footballers report financial and mental struggles.

Taking into account this high number, the complex nature of footballing retirement, and the need for competent support from the environment, we must aim at gaining insight in the perceived impact of athletic retirement on athletes’ psychological health and wellbeing, providing insight in the facilitators and challenges footballers face before, during and after retirement.

During a player’s professional career, he or she has handlers like agents, coaches, friends and family who all have nugget of advice to give. And all of these people have a part to play in the first two stages of a player’s life. But no one really focuses on the finale, the retirement, the grand closing! None of these people want to focus on what happens to a player when he or she is coming to end of their career.

Development

This is perhaps the most difficult phase of a player’s career as this defines their future. At this stage we have coaches, teammates, parents, and teachers, all of whom play a part in the development of a player. In this stage, players are taught the fundamentals of playing football and quite often little else. This stager is often just about the technical development of a player and very little to do with his growth as person.

Here and there development players are given education about financial management, but I would like to pose a question on this point: have we ever taken time to find out if the development player we are giving reading material to can even read? Do we know if he has the cognitive skills to understand and process all this information? Probably not!

I am not saying footballers are uneducated, but let’s be honest, many of us struggle with things to do with reading and writing, more so studying. So, we need to identify these problems early on address them before this player even moves up the rung to the next stage.

Performance

This too is a key stage in a players growth pattern as this is the stage when all the technical development must now pay off and a player can begin to express him or herself on the field on full on competition. This is when a player gets to sign his or her first professional contract and has become a fully-fledged football professional.

But this stage is also the beginning of a player’s problems.

People who are around players at this stage want to create superstars and hide them behind a fence. pros don’t get to meet with ordinary people as often as they should and are instead thrust on handlers, agents and what not who begin to think for these players. These handlers make sure players don’t get to meet people and talk to them about everyday problems so more often than not, players end up out to touch with the real world.

A player’s handlers will sometimes advise a client to buy that car or that car, because these are things people value are the on the surface. For example, my success or failure is often measured by whether or not I have car but does anyone know how many cattle I have during that time?

Grand closing

This is the crux of my issue!

During their heydays, players only get to meet VIPs etc. but once this circle is done, no one takes you from there and gives you grand closing or even advises players about the grand closing! After pro players have gone through the stages of development, performance, they are inevitably are thrown to the curb. At this point a player is no longer not cloistered or shut out from the world and they begin to see the real world.

The so-called handlers use us when we are at the top of our game and after that they dump them, treated like a commodity and then discarded. The world starts describing players as ‘finished’ but only the playing career is finished but when we say they finished, what do we really mean? Literary it means this player is dead!

But given that there is a handler in development and handler in performance, for the life of me, I do not get how there is never one for the grand closing, a player’s finale. Who is failing the player and who is responsible for this transition? I want us to take responsibility and take care of these people before the psychological murder that inevitably creep into a player’s life.

Players need that guy who will not judge them but advise them about the transition from active player to retirement. In this sport, you don’t really retire early but injuries and what not force you to retire and we struggle through life when this happens.

The person who is involved with a player’s career at the end and during this transition to the grand closing is the most loyal person to a player. This person is the only who cares enough to worry about a player’s life after they retire from football.

Without this guy, some former players become so disenchanted with football that they will not even watch a football match. There is a lot of anger and bitterness among players.

Why players are all seemingly headed towards coaching yet football has many other facets like being a team manager, match analyst or even a fitness trainer. If football respects players and a player has a guiding hand during their transition into retirement, football must give this player such options after retirement

We are now at a point where generation after generation of football retirees is on the curb. This needs to be addressed and soon than later because this might be impossible to fix later because these players are invariable bitter with football.

Most former players today don’t have children who play football because kids of today ask them: you want to play football, what did it ever do for you?

God bless and may we all keep loving football.