It struck Fraser Franks for the first time that his entire existence revolved around being a footballer, and not much else, as he sat in the classroom waiting to stand up and share something interesting about himself that did not involve his sport or family.
Franks had enrolled in a university course after his football career, one that had taken him to clubs including Luton, Stevenage and Newport County, was ended prematurely by the diagnosis of a heart defect at 28 years old. On his first day the group of former sportspeople had five minutes to think about what formed their identity beyond sport – and Franks was struggling.
“I was completely lost,” Franks, now 30, says. “Football was my only real interest. I was obsessed. I didn’t play any other sports, didn’t have any other hobbies, didn’t speak to many people in different industries and most of my friends were in the football world.”
Yet even Franks’s journey through football is nothing compare to what it is like for young footballers now. The football world – and world in general – has changed significantly since Franks was a teenage defender trying to make it at Chelsea’s academy.
Many young footballers i has spoken to talk of struggling to piece back together their identity – the essence of who they truly are – after being discarded in their late teens by clubs, many of whom have been there from eight years old and spent a decade being told, and believing, they will make it big.
“I cannot imagine just how hard it is, and will be, for this generation with TikTok skills videos, Instagram accounts from age eight and Rising Ballers accounts showcasing the ‘next big thing’ for likes and views,” Franks says.
Rising Ballers is a media agency and platform who describe themselves as “the biggest Gen Z football brand in the UK”. They have a monthly digital reach of 20 million showcasing young footballers, and now work with the likes of Nike and PlayStation. They also run the Rising Ballers College for young players who have not yet made it, providing a two-year education program with a focus on football.
The attention can be uplifting, especially for those who make it (Rising Ballers worked with Phil Foden before he became a huge star) but there are downsides to those who don’t. Many struggle to know what their purpose is when football no longer wants them.
Realising that academy footballers were gaining notoriety even before they had signed a professional contract, the Premier League added regulations in 2019 to ensure academies were supporting players better. Critics do not believe they go far enough.
Even parents can be part of the problem. Some have been known to create Instagram accounts of their young children including teams they have trialled for in their profile.
Franks now works with the B5 Consultancy delivering education sessions to footballers in Premier League academies and their parents trying to combat the problems. One club they work with is recently promoted Norwich City.
“We work a lot with them on the concept of their wider identity, not just as a footballer, but as a human being,” Carys Dalton, Norwich’s academy player care manager, says.
“We devote a lot of time and support to dual careers – whether we think the lad is going to make it in professional football or not. The playing career will always come to an end. Our approach to personal development is always holistic and never solely football focused.”
A lack of identity can strike footballers at any age – after several years in an academy, when a career is cut short by injury, like Franks, or retiring in your thirties after a long, successful career in the game. Jack Wilshere spoke recently about his struggles after a series of bad injuries which have left the former England and Arsenal star, once considered the future of English football, without a club aged 29.
Leigh Nicol, 25, came through Arsenal Women’s academy, represented Scotland at youth level and other clubs including Millwall and Charlton. Two years ago, she decided to take a year away from football after her iCloud account was hacked and stolen intimate images were leaked online.
“It was around a month after the 2018/19 season when I was on holiday with my ‘football’ friends, that I found myself in a situation I had never experienced before,” Nicol says. “I had made the decision that I wasn’t going to return to the sport for the following season, the sport I had played since I could walk, that had imbedded discipline and ambition into me and gave me unique status in my hometown. ‘The football girl’ is what I was recognised as.
“I was in Marbella with a group of players from the Women’s Super League and found myself tagging along at the back of the group thinking, ‘I’m no longer as socially accepted as the others’. I became ashamed when the question made its way round to me: ‘What do you do?’.
“‘I’m just at university’ would be the answer I gave. I’ve never had any intention to go to university. I was no longer special; I was no longer ‘the football girl’ and I felt the effects. For the first time in my life I felt like I was just another human being and that hit me hard. Why do a lot of sports people feel that they can’t be just another human being?”
Nicol, who is back now playing for Crystal Place, noticed that some of her relationships with close family members were based solely on being a footballer. “Those relationships became distant,” she says.
It wasn’t about the money, either. Stepping away from football only meant losing a few hundred pounds a month. “Your status as a footballer attracts people from an early age,” she says. “The friends that hang on to you at school because you play at a top club and they see you as the cool kid and then, later on, want the Dubai holidays, the VIP tables at night clubs, the free tickets and signed shirts and want to see their videos of them partying with you going viral across WhatsApp groups.
“The game itself can be the player’s drug and they are dependent on it. They feel fulfilled by that win on a Saturday, the crowds singing their names and all the fire emojis on their social media posts. When they lose, or perform badly, they are empty. When their career is over, how do you ever get that feeling back? It’s an addiction in many ways, and many have filled the void with drink and drugs. What can ever replicate that winning feeling and how do you overcome that?
“When I struggled with losing my identity as ‘the footballer’ it was a moment when I was struggling not to be defined as a victim of crime after the iCloud hack. It was a perfect storm and I wanted to know if others felt this pressure, too. I’ve spoken to many players now – male and female – and not only am I not alone it seems that almost every player feels it. That was the moment that I thought something has to be done about our identity and how we perceive ourselves.
“Instead of identifying ourselves with our jobs, why can’t we identify ourselves as who we are? Instead of ‘I’m a footballer’, why can’t it be that I’m a positive and ambitious person, who provides so much more to life than our ability to keep a ball within a rectangle and post it on Instagram?”
They are questions football must wrestle with in the coming years.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3gK9JZk
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