One third of professional footballers divorce within the first year of retiring from playing football. This escalates to 70% within three years of retirement. There is a plethora of research on the significant issues presented by the sports career transition of athletes as a whole, including that of professional footballers. However, none have focused on the potential contributing factors of the footballer’s retirement to the relationship breakdown specifically during this transitional period. Therefore, further investigation is warranted to understand whether a footballer’s retirement is a catalyst for some of the significant relationship breakdowns within the football industry, and in professional sport at large.
The ongoing research on this topic is titled ‘An Exploration of the Significant Couple Relationships of Male English Premier League Footballers During the Sports Career Transition’. The author recently participated in a podcast hosted by Lifestyled Club, a support network for wives and partners of professional footballers, to share her own personal experiences of married life and the sports career transition with a professional footballer, and to discuss her research findings thus far. You can listen to the podcast by clicking here
This post was written by Gillian Quinn is a PhD candidate at Dublin City University.
gillian.quinn37@mail.dcu.ie
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