Adebayo Akinfenwa: ‘I feared my kids would go hungry after injury, clubs must do more to help players’

It was a Tuesday night in South Wales and without him knowing it, Adebayo Akinfenwa’s Swansea career had just ended. The striker was being given oxygen in the hope that, despite the pain, there would still be a chance his injury was less serious than feared.

In the ambulance from the ground to the hospital, he was first told his leg had been broken in a coming-together with a former team-mate, Scunthorpe defender Steve Foster. Akinfenwa’s girlfriend was pregnant, and with his contract up at the end of the season, he had effectively just been told he was unemployed.

“It was a defining moment, not just in my career but in my life,” he tells i. “I broke my leg and that was my tools to earn. I had to adapt my style of football, but the more important thing I took from it was how financially, I was so unprepared. I was just frivolous – frivolous in my thinking, not in my spending.

“When you’re young, you’ve got that fearlessness, you’ve got that mindset that you’re unbreakable. I didn’t have an income, I was living pay cheque to pay cheque. You get told as a young person from adults, ‘save for a rainy day’, but what I was going through was a storm.”

More from Football

5 alternatives to De Jong that Man Utd could target to upgrade Ten Hag's faltering midfield10 August, 2022Drop Dalot, sell McFred and pray De Jong leaves Barcelona… how Ten Hag can turn Man Utd around09 August, 2022Axing Tyrone Mings is a huge gamble that could make or break Steven Gerrard's Villa tenure09 August, 2022

At the time, he was 24 but had already played for eight different clubs at senior level. Before signing for Millwall in 2007, for whom he made just seven appearances, he had used his life savings within three months, been declined for a loan and was balancing different credit cards.

“It got to the point,” he recalls, “where my greatest fear – and I’m a father of five – was for my kids to never go hungry. And that’s where it started.”

Akinfenwa’s story perhaps sounds unusual because for most of his career, he has been among the most high-profile forwards further down the football pyramid. It’s in that realm outside the Premier League, however, that he stresses players need more guidance managing their money – which many don’t receive at present.

Asked if clubs are doing enough to teach players how to avoid getting into financial problems, he admits: “No I don’t. I can only talk for the lower leagues because I wasn’t in the elites, where they earned hundreds of thousands. But I don’t think there is [enough support].

“Maybe they think it’s a touchy subject to tell people how to spend their money. But I think it’s imperative, it’s due diligence that clubs should. Football is very institutionalised, we’re told where to go, what to eat, what to wear when to train – so why should there not be an initiative and make it mandatory.”

There are EFL clubs who host sessions offering players advice on how to invest and save, but it is not a requirement. The charitable institutions connected to some clubs also give players support when they retire, but Akinfenwa believes many ex-pros find themselves in the wilderness.

“Once you’re gone you’re gone, they’re onto the next one,” he says. “At times we feel like we’re hired help, we do a job and then we move on and we’re forgotten about. Football is cut-throat. Let’s say you get a one-season contract playing in the Football League and the next season you don’t get a contract. You’re constantly up against it and you have to be at your peak constantly. But people only see the Saturdays, and the goals, they don’t see the work that goes in, that you don’t know if you’re going to earn, you’re living contract to contract.”

More on Sports Interview

Eddie Jones: 'English rugby is too reliant on public schools, it needs to blow up that system'06 August, 2022Demba Ba: Why I fear for Chelsea, and how I nearly ended up at Man Utd last season04 August, 2022Sky's new Eddie Hearn wants Dubois, Joyce and co end the era of 'one-sided' heavyweight fights04 August, 2022

Akinfenwa’s own post-retirement plans include acting, presenting – and wrestling. “Some people say my whole career was wrestling,” he laughs. “But I never earned the money that when I retired I would just be able to sit there and not do anything. There were a lot of players like me in the lower leagues that know it’s a job we love but we don’t get paid the thousands and thousands. We get paid enough as long as we live within our means.

“But I do think there’s a stereotype that comes with it. ‘He’s a footballer, so he’s cool, he hasn’t got money worries’. With footballers, that stereotype is only the elite, they’re the ones with the massive houses, the luxury cars, the yachts, but then there’s a whole world of footballers that are way below it but still get tarnished with ‘oh, you’re a footballer, you must earn crazy amounts.'”

Akinfenwa retired earlier this year after a six-year spell with Wycombe Wanderers that included promotion to the Championship and two club Player of the Season awards. It concluded a career that was often dominated by talk of his size, but he maintains he “never set out to prove anybody wrong”.

“As a six-year-old, I watched John Barnes and I wanted to be a footballer,” he says. “I’m unapologetically myself, I didn’t set out to be different, I didn’t set out to be 17 stone I didn’t set out overly love the gym, I just wanted to be myself and play football.”

Adebayo Akinfenwa is supporting Experian’s United For Financial Health campaign to improve young people’s financial education, helping them take control of their finances and manage their money better.

from Football | News and analysis from the Premier League and beyond | iNews https://ift.tt/3xdloDB