peterWhy is it that 90 percent of former players don’t want to be involved in the game after they retire? Is it because they just don’t want to be involved with a sport they so loved for all the years they played or there is something pushing them away.
I am sure the reason is anger, frustration, bitterness at the remuneration that the game gave them and the many unkept promises. But it would be irresponsible not to mention that in all our struggles especially post-playing career, many of them are self-inflicted because we did not have a plan for retirement. We just simply forgot that eventually we would stop playing and finances would become more strained.
We don’t plan, we just wait for tragedies then we react. But this has to stop: our successes and failings as people who can add value to the game and continue to make a living in football will only be possible through planning.
But, too the administrators who run the local game. Many of these started out as supporters who were then given access to inside football which helped them develop into administrators. And yet how quickly they have forgotten about us and treat us with little to no respect!
And for this, many if not all retired footballers are angry and frustrated with the local game. We have people that have become so disillusioned former players who do not want to hear a word about football. They literary hate football!
In my view, we need as many of these fellows as possible. But how do we get them to rediscover their love for the game: we engage and begin a healing process so to speak, hear their problems with the game and begin to address these problems. That’s all it takes: an unconditional show of respect and love for those that gave their whole lives to the service of football.
Football needs these ex-players more than they need football — commentary work with a pundit who actually played enough football to appreciate tactics and what not, coaching; administration — all things football for football by footballers.
Any one gathering of a group of retired footballers provides a telling glimpse into the mostly nostalgia-heavy, tale-filled, still-aspirant life of the modern professional footballer after hanging up the boots.
Technically, you’d classify it as laughter — only this was a deeper, richer and louder variant than usual. And the hearty guffaws and knee slaps that follow were in keeping with the occasion.
It is as if someone had opened a box of 1990s-era team cards and started drawing names at random. There are many former teammates, guys who shared a dressing room together at one club or the other. And there are conversational pairings who even shared rooms in camp when we all still played competitively.
Invariably, there are muted conversations of recent deaths among us retired footballers. But these events are always clearly something more: part cast reunion of 1990s super stars, part chapter meeting of an unofficial club. Without being overdramatic, it also had the vibe of a group therapy session.
More often than not, these occasions can enable a sportswriter to spend hours playing anthropologist, examining an exotic tribe: the retired pro-footballer who has moved — sometimes gracefully, sometimes uneasily — into middle age.
To many who see us, they think: Pro-footballers, they’re just like us. They, too, simultaneously love their mothers and live in fear of them. They, too, get irrationally competitive playing cards.
They, too, lose the remote in the couch, lament the line at buses, obsess over their entry status for football matches, need to find a charger for their smartphone.
Bongani Ndlovu