The fears and anxieties of footballers in 2024

“This is the part of players’ careers that doesn’t really get spoken about,” begins Sam Walker, goalkeeper for League Two Bradford City.

He is talking about the summer his daughter Sophia, then two and a half years old, had open-heart surgery. In the six months prior, Walker, now 33, had been playing for Kilmarnock and flying home twice a week to be with his family in Hertfordshire, “because I didn’t want to be apart from the children for that long”. Sophia’s illness meant that, after his contract expired, he lived off savings to “just be a dad and not worry about moving into the next contract”.

“I knocked back stuff that would have meant I’d be travelling,” he adds. “I just needed to be there for my daughter. It couldn’t have been forever, but I’m really grateful that I was able to.”

The Athletic spent October talking to footballers from across the men’s and women’s pyramids about, as Walker’s Bradford team-mate Jamie Walker puts it, “what people don’t see in football”. What is the life of a footballer outside the Premier League in 2024? What are their fears and anxieties? How do they build their lives and families amid changing clubs and a physically demanding career?

From finances and families to social media and mental health, from the Women’s Super League (WSL) to men’s League Two, the players have been candid and vulnerable in their responses. In turn, the breadth of their experiences, as well as the differences between the sexes, feels instructive.

Jamie Walker estimates that his son Jace, now nine, had “five, six nurseries” before starting school as his father’s career took him from club to club. They have lived in four houses in his three years at Bradford. “I’ve looked into buying a couple of times, but I’m still only 31, so if I never got a new contract, we’d need to move again,” he says. “It’s quite tough to set roots anywhere. It’s a big part of what people don’t see in football, especially at League One, League Two, where you’re not getting paid as much as the lads at the top and they’ve got people to do stuff for them.”

Antoni Sarcevic’s move this summer to Bradford from Stockport County, and the longer daily commute, means he can no longer do the school run and the lion’s share of the childcare. His wife has left her job to take his place. Sarcevic previously lived apart from his partner and newborn son during a short spell at Shrewsbury Town. In 2017, they moved from Manchester to Plymouth when their oldest son was two weeks old.

“I had a bad patch where I ended up terminating my contract and falling out of love with the game,” he says. “A question my wife asked triggered something: ‘If you haven’t got football, what would you do? If this move is going to get you going, we’ll be with you’. Football is my life.”

It is rare to hear male athletes talk about fatherhood and childcare, even though so many — Sam Walker says his squads have each featured “maybe eight to 10 fathers” — have children while playing.

Of the 300-plus players in the WSL, meanwhile, only two are pregnant. Maternity policies are improving: in August, AC Milan became the first club in Europe to guarantee renewals for players who become pregnant in the final year of their contracts. In October, FIFPro, the global players union, launched a guide for footballers returning from childbirth, having found that 75 per cent of players felt their clubs did not provide pregnancy-specific help.

Inevitably, pregnancy takes a greater biological toll on mothers. That aspect “terrifies” Durham Women defender Sarah Wilson, 33. Days after her side’s 1-0 win over Newcastle United, Wilson and two of her team-mates are back in the dressing room to speak to The Athletic. Captain since 2014, Wilson remembers when the players would bag-pack in supermarkets to raise funds for the club. Durham, one of the few Women’s Championship clubs independent from a men’s side, have been fully professional for three seasons. Football is now Wilson’s livelihood.

“You get to a certain age and think, ‘If I have kids now, that’s potentially my career done’,” she says. “And I know that’s not the reality, but it’s something you have to think about. We have to stop for a certain amount of time. You don’t know, at the end of it, if you’re going to be able to return.” She brings up AC Milan. “A new contract is 100 per cent something I would be thinking about.”

“At the moment, football is my main priority,” adds her team-mate Carly Johns, 21. “And I’m always like, ‘Should I wait until after football to have kids?’. But then I’m going to be quite old to be a mum. I want to be a young parent.”

West Ham’s Dagny Brynjarsdottir is one of the WSL’s few mothers, having given birth to sons Brynjar and Andreas in 2018 and 2024 respectively. “When I came back after my first son, I always said I was never going to do it again because that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, physically or mentally,” the 33-year-old says. “I always said I was going to retire after my second — but here I am, almost 100 per cent back to myself.”

Her second pregnancy was fraught with “all-day sickness: I could be throwing up in the middle of the night or at 9pm or 5pm”.

Nonetheless, she made it to the gym most days and had her last session — a 2.5km walk — two days before Andreas’ due date. When he was five days old, Brynjarsdottir paid for a six-week postpartum training programme with a former footballer specialising in pregnancy. “You have strength coaches (at football clubs), but their degree is in getting footballers back on track, not female athletes who got pregnant,” she says. “Your max speed, quickness, sharpness come latest. When you start training, you see players sprinting by you that you know you should absolutely be faster than.

“When I was pregnant with my first, a lot of people doubted me. ‘You’re done playing. You can’t do the comeback’. But when I came back, I had a lot of support from the coaches I played with. But I feel like now, everyone expected me to come back and play at the highest level — but then I haven’t had the same support coming back. I should be with the national team now, but that’s the first time I’ve not been called up since I was 18. I got called into camp at this time in my first pregnancy and I’m way ahead now compared to then.”

Do some people assume she’s not ready yet, just because she’s a mother? “Yeah. Iceland is a bit behind. They look at the age, and they’re, like, ‘Oh — she’s a mum’. My national team coach didn’t call me for seven months. There haven’t been any conversations with the staff here or with me to ask how things are going.”

West Ham, at least, have been supportive. Andreas was welcomed at the training ground and Brynjarsdottir would breastfeed between gym and football sessions.

Now eight months, he has stopped accompanying his mother to work but was part of the club’s pre-season tour of Australia. “If he wasn’t able to come with me, I would not have gone,” Brynjarsdottir says. “I cannot just take my little one by myself. My husband has to come and my six-year-old because we don’t have any grandparents here. If I wasn’t serious about what I was doing, I wouldn’t play overseas.”

Brynjarsdottir says motherhood has made her a better footballer: she is calmer, more empathetic and patient. Fatherhood has helped Jamie Walker to mentally separate himself from the game. “In days gone by, if we’d lost, the day after the game you’d just mope around all day, stay in bed, whatever,” he says. “Now I’ve got that motivation to get out of bed. My daughter is only four. She’ll come to the game and I’ll say: ‘Did you see Daddy’s goal?’. And she’ll say: ‘Did you score?’. Stuff like that helps a lot. Before, I never had that. I’d go home and think about every single action I made in the game. You beat yourself up.”

West Ham’s Dagny Brynjarsdottir at her baby shower (West Ham United)

The nomadic nature of football can complicate plans to start a family. The Durham goalkeeper Tatiana Saunders, 31, worked on Wall Street in the U.S. for two years after graduating from Dartmouth College. She swapped the corporate ladder for football just as her career in finance was taking off and has played in Iceland, France and England. Her former team-mates are spread all over.

“It’s even worse in the men’s game because I feel like they get traded like cattle: ‘You’re being loaned out. See you later. Report by Monday’,” Saunders begins, “but they have the financial backing to support their families. As women, we don’t have that. You can’t really expect (your partner to follow) if you have to move five hours away. It puts a strain on your relationship. How do you expect your partner, who’s potentially making more than you, to pack up their life? I have loads of friends doing that now. They’ve been with their partners for years and they see them once a week.”

The West Bromwich Albion goalkeeper Alex Palmer, 28, was the Championship Golden Glove winner in the 2023-24 season but spent almost 11 years loaned out at various clubs before making his Baggies debut.

“All of a sudden, you got a phone call after training and it’s: ‘You’re going home, you’re packing a bag and you’re going this evening’,” he says. “The Notts County one was: ‘Turn up on the Friday, train, play on the Saturday and that’s it. Thank you for coming’.

“The first experience I had living away on my own was Plymouth. You’re in a hotel, 200 miles away from home and you don’t feel settled until you’re in that apartment. Your bags aren’t unpacked. You think, ‘This is only temporary’.”

His future wife was still studying at university during his loan to Plymouth. “The first time she travelled down, it took her five hours on a Friday in a little Citroen C1,” he says. “She was a mess. After that, she knew she could do it. We’d been together for quite some time so we almost knew it had to work.”

His season-long loan to Lincoln City was the first time he could choose his own house and his partner was able to live with him. They found a community in similarly-aged players, whose partners provided company when Palmer played away. “If you go home and your partner’s not happy, it can take a massive toll,” he says. “It’s so tough on them. We almost forget about everything when we’re going on away days and they’re at home twiddling their thumbs.”

The men’s game has improved its attitude towards mental health but many players are still reticent to open up to staff or team-mates. Psychology is an accepted performance aid but talking about mental health in an emotional sense is less straightforward. “We’re in a hugely competitive, pressured environment,” says Sam Walker. “There’s this element of maybe not wanting to show weakness — it might be to the manager, staff or another player. If you’re a striker and you’re showing that to other strikers, they might be able to pounce. It’s got work to do to be a truly open forum where people can really, truly speak how they feel without the risk of any sort of backlash from that. Given the nature of the game and the nature of sport in general, it remains to be seen (whether that can happen).

“It has got a whole lot better over my career. You’re always touching base with people. ‘How are you getting on? Are you OK?’. If they’re injured or in a rough patch, I’d like to think that lads are able to say they’re finding it tough and there’d be people there.”

Perhaps it explains why his team-mates, at previous clubs, sought help externally. Sarcevic reached out to the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) when, feeling frozen out by a manager he once adored, he “desperately” needed someone to talk to. “At the time, I wouldn’t have gone to a team-mate or anything,” he says. “The PFA is massive because it’s all kept in-house and no one else knows, but you’ve got someone.” PFA membership is not open to players in the Women’s Championship, although 50 per cent of second-tier players are understood to retain access to PFA support having once been in the WSL.

Jamie Walker came to Bradford when at a “crossroads” in his career, unsure whether he “wanted to keep going” with football after leaving boyhood club Hearts. “I’ll happily admit I was in a really bad place,” he says.

Left to right: Bradford City’s Antoni Sarcevic, Sam Walker and Jamie Walker (Bradford City)

He contacted the Scottish mental health charity Back Onside, benefiting from regular sessions. “The worries of, ‘What’s next?’, has always been the biggest thing — the stress and uncertainty of not playing and not knowing what will come,” he continues. “Am I going to get a new contract? Where’s my next wage going to come from?” He spent six months on loan at Bradford in 2022 before signing permanently. “I think, ‘Yeah — that’s me for the next two years’. Before you know it, that’s done. Last December, I broke my leg at Doncaster. I think, ‘By the time I’ll come back, there’s maybe 10, 12 games left. If I don’t hit the ground running, where am I going to go from here?’.

“It’s my livelihood, all I’ve done since I left school. I’ve been quite astute with my money so I’ve got that to back me up, but it’s not going to last forever.

“When you do get a little injury or stuff isn’t going well off the pitch or the kids are ill, sometimes it all weighs you down and it gets to a point where you think, ‘I can’t do this anymore’. It’s not just one thing — it’s a snowball effect. That’s when you start getting into a dark place. You might have a bad game, stuff’s not happening for you on the pitch or off the pitch and you just think, ‘Is there really any point in this anymore?’. That’s when you need to speak up. I came out the other side of that and now when I have a bit of a low, I know what to do.”

The women’s game is also busting another taboo: the menstrual cycle. In 2023, Durham began working with a female health physiotherapist. “She spoke about everything that no one talks about in women’s football,” says Wilson. “We are quite an open team, but when you’re sitting in that classroom talking about it, even as a group of females, it can be uncomfortable. And you’re like, ‘Why is this uncomfortable?’. It shouldn’t be.”

The club’s approach — including follow-up sessions, cycle tracking and symptom reporting — has been particularly transformative for the players with endometriosis, where cells similar to those lining the womb grow elsewhere (the former Chelsea manager Emma Hayes underwent an emergency hysterectomy linked to the condition in 2022).

“Some of the girls who really, really struggle with some of the symptoms can’t physically train,” Wilson says. “Until this point, they’ve had to push through and probably been really poorly. Imagine having to just pretend like everything’s OK. But now, we speak about it and everyone’s more educated. It’s fine.”

Perhaps the biggest physiological issue in the women’s game over recent years has been the epidemic of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. An emphasis on conditioning and injury prevention has allayed many players’ anxieties but not all lower-league players have been so lucky.

Hashtag United Women play in the FA Women’s National League South — the third tier of women’s football — and forward Emma Samways, 25, ruptured her ACL in a cup semi-final against Halifax.

“It was a muddy pitch with potholes and sand,” she says. “The groundsman was saying it wasn’t playable. In the end, the referees said it was between the teams if we wanted to play. For us, it would have meant we’d have to come back the following week and it would have been out of our own expenses. So we agreed to play.”

Her foot got stuck in the turf. She twisted, felt the telltale pop. A private MRI scan revealed a high-grade ACL rupture. Her doctor said the waiting list for surgery on the NHS was 12-18 months, followed by 12 months of recovery. “That’s two and a half years where I wouldn’t be able to do my frontline policing job or play football,” says Samways. “I do the job 90 per cent of my life and football 10 per cent. Sometimes, I can’t make training because I’m stuck at work and I’ve got to deal with a prisoner.” She plans her shifts around United’s twice-weekly training, working every Saturday night, 5pm to 2am, before playing football the next day.

Her parents offered to pay for private surgery from their savings but Samways had quotes between £8,000-£16,000. She and the Hashtag United CEO, YouTuber Spencer Owen, decided to crowdfund for the surgery (this is common practice in the lower reaches of women’s football and United have a huge social media following). They raised £6,000 of the £9,200 for surgeries and consultations, with Samways’ parents covering the remainder.

“The only things in the media are the WSL players, but so many girls in the lower leagues have an ACL injury,” she says. “It’s definitely something you consider. But because there’s hardly any research and nothing you can really do, it’s not something we’d go into a match thinking we would do.”

Sam Walker has kept an eye on the ACL crisis in women’s football, having ruptured his own ACL in 2015 when at Colchester United. Learning of the ACL rupture “hit me like a train”, but fortunately Colchester extended his contract. “Such an amazing gesture to take that stress away from me,” he says.

He had been academic at school and planned to do A Levels until Chelsea came along. Training alongside John Terry, Frank Lampard and Ashley Cole, he found himself living “a completely different life to the one I had loosely mapped out as a teenager”, but a grammar school-educated goalkeeper with 12 GCSEs had always wanted a degree and during his rehabilitation he began studying for the first, in business management and accounting, of two. “Until that point, I hadn’t even considered retirement,” he says. “It felt like such a distant thing. Then the ACL injury hits you and you feel fragile all of a sudden. An end date comes quite close.

“I’m constantly trying to talk to team-mates. ‘What are you thinking?’. It can be such a short career and it can be taken away from you in an instant. Between games, there’s plenty of time in a day to divert a couple of hours to something like a degree.”

The players of Wilson’s generation, having transitioned into football from other careers, are on paper well-placed for life after football. She still works part-time in education, but is anxious about leaving all she has ever known. Female players need more help when they finish playing, she says. “You see some of the big players leaving the game and it’s a big deal: they go into journalism and on the TV. But there are lots of girls who have done so much for the game and just moved out of it. Who is helping them?”

As the women’s game has professionalised, Wilson swapped “full-time work and part-time football for part-time work, full-time football. When you think about having to leave work… the game’s transformed incredibly but without sounding money-orientated, the money isn’t there yet. You move into a job where you take a massive financial hit. But when I got the chance, I didn’t even think about anything. I wanted to play professional football.”

“With women’s football, people who play professionally are people who genuinely love it,” continues Saunders. “We’re not making savings. You look at people who are our age who aren’t in football. My childhood best friend is now on her second house, has two kids and has been married for the past five years. It’s difficult to look at people who are not in football and be, like, my gosh, so many of my friends are married, settled down, having kids. I feel like I’m behind.”

Palmer met a financial advisor, via his agent, four years ago. Raised by a single mum, he has always been sensible with money. “Then all of a sudden, you’re earning a very good amount for how old you are,” he says. “It can be difficult. My agent drilled home how important it was to save, but I think I had to enjoy it, and he knew that. When you’re 19, 20, you don’t know how long it’s going to last. You might not have the opportunity again to do some of the stuff — go on nice holidays, have a nice car. That’s when my mum’s attitude flipped a little bit and was like: ‘Enjoy it, but you’ve got to be saving’.”

West Brom’s Alex Palmer went out on loan to six clubs between 2015 and 2022 (MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Such support is even more pivotal in the social media era, Sarcevic considers. Young players can “see all the top players doing things and buying things and think that’s the right thing to do,” he says. “With the money and lifestyle, I can see how easy it is for younger lads to get drawn into that. It’s quite scary.”

Sam Walker has known “plenty of players” who “look at their club pages and search their names” on social media. Palmer’s family members have stumbled across posts about him without meaning to. “It can be harder for people around you because they’re the ones that tend to have a little look,” he says. “I try to stay off certain ones that I don’t think are going to be any good for me. Some of them breed a lot of negativity, so what’s the point of being on there?” Sarcevic was advised to delete his X account after a bad spell at one club; Jamie Walker says his younger self had “a bit of attitude” and would “write back to fans” but he, too, has since deleted his X account. “Just because of some of the nonsense on it,” he says. “I don’t mind people criticising me and having an opinion on football — I choose to do football and it’s just part of the game — but when people write stuff that’s not really got any perspective, that’s when I sometimes get a bit annoyed.”

At Durham, Wilson says, social media is a tool “to grow the club” and interactions with fans are largely cordial. What rankles is the wider perception of women’s football. “If a female makes a mistake, that’s the standard of the women’s game,” says Saunders. “With the men’s game, it’s almost like an exception. ‘What a horrible error’ — error implying that it was a one-off. But we’re finally getting the platform we deserve and they are realising the standard. Where women’s football is different to the men’s is it’s a lot more family-friendly.”

Lots of us have wondered whether we could have been footballers. We might know someone who almost made it — but would they have had the willpower, the mental strength? All this confirms that we see such a minute part of footballers’ lives. Surviving everything off the pitch is another matter.

“I don’t know how to say it, but most of my friends outside football probably look at it in a different light now,” concludes Jamie Walker. “If you asked someone, they’d think it was the best job in the world. Everything’s rosy, every single day, you get paid well and that’s it. My friends have seen the stuff that I went through. They know that football’s not all it’s made out to be sometimes. There can be tough times along the way.”

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Kelsea Petersen)