Sky Sports' Johnny Phillips: Football such a short part of a player’s life

When careers come to an end in the early and mid-30s there is so much life ahead yet so many footballers just aren’t equipped for what lies in wait.

Earlier this week I met up with the former Newcastle and Ipswich striker Alex Mathie, who retrained in a completely different job after leaving professional football.

In many ways, his post-football career is the template for any footballer who doesn’t want to sit back on his earnings.

Mathie’s heyday was in the late 1990s and he certainly didn’t earn the wages of today’s top flight and Championship players, so in that sense he had to look seriously at further employment, but it was interesting to hear him speak about the mentality of work and how he needed to do a full-time job to keep his mind active.

Mathie manages the Royal Mail sorting office at Garforth on the outskirts of Leeds.

It is a huge operation, with 52,000 packages coming through the depot every day, from standard letters to parcels that are bigger than a pillar box itself.

The Scot took up his second career on retiring from football in 2007. He initially worked as a postman.

“I had never used a computer or anything like that,” he recalls. So life as a postman was the first rung on a career path that has seen him move off the postie’s patch and into the sorting offices.

Mathie taught himself how to use a PC and then took a number of other courses, working his way up to the position he has now, looking after over 80 staff at Garforth.

Mathie’s day begins at 6am and he starts by drawing up the rota of each delivery employee’s round on a whiteboard.

“It’s a tactics board, I call them my players,” he says.

The days wind down by 3pm, but it is not unusual for work to continue into the evening if there is a shortage of staff or a backlog of deliveries – not that Mathie ever lets the post build up in his place.

Spending a morning with him in his office environment, the parallels with a football dressing room were evident – the camaraderie, daily routines and workload.

It’s the act of working – physically and mentally – that is so important to Mathie.

He is almost as sharp and fresh as he was during his peak playing days two decades ago.

For many, working is a way of staying young.

Sir Alex Ferguson famously struggled with the concept of retirement, going back on his decision to leave Manchester United during the 2001/02 season.

When he did finally pack up his belongings from the Carrington training ground in May 2013, it was with a heavy heart.

But away from management there was to be no rolling out of the pipe and slippers as he took up lecturing roles with Harvard University and an ambassador’s position with Uefa.

Several years ago we filmed Mathie at the beginning of his second career, when he was out on his postman rounds.

It was for a Sky Sports series called ‘Where Are They Now?’ about former footballers who had moved into a completely different profession.

One thing all the subjects of that series had in common was how well rounded they had become as individuals.

Although football was what made them famous, none of the ex-players felt they needed to be defined by their former careers.

There were some colourful new roles being undertaken too.

Chelsea and Southampton’s Ken Monkou had gone on to own a pancake shop in Rotterdam, Arsenal’s David Hillier had become a fireman, Everton’s Neville Southall worked with disadvantaged youngsters teaching them outside the framework of mainstream education and former Albion midfielder Sean Flynn had gone into the countryside running a caravan park in a corner of Cornwall.

When Mathie eventually retires, he will have served far more time in the employment of Royal Mail than he ever did for all his clubs put together as a footballer.

He was perceptive enough to recognise this would be the case when he retrained all those years ago.

It is not easy leaving the game at 35 with no qualifications.

When the fearlessness of youth has been replaced by self-doubt, the world can seem an intimidating place outside the confines of the dressing room.

It would be fantastic if the Professional Footballers’ Association, the Premier League and the Football League harnessed the experiences of all these former players who were thriving in jobs away from the game.

Mathie and Co have so much to offer young players in today’s game.

They can advise on the importance of having a structure and targets in place once the boots are hung up.

One of the great problems with the modern-day game is how inward looking it is – football is the be all and end all.

The reality for many is that the game offers only short-term employment when taken in the context of a lifetime.

Mathie’s is an uplifting story, but not all those who leave the sport every year can look forward to future fulfilment.