What happens after sporting glory?
Three former sporting stars on what really happened after the cheering stops
BEFORE PROFESSIONALISM BOOMED in the ’90s, elite-level sport could often be a part-time gig. Rugby league forwards laid bricks between gamedays; AFL stars had side hustles as real estate agents. Careers ended and players simply returned to the jobs they’d kept all along. But that world is gone.
Today, Australian sport spawns teenagers who have never known a life outside the high-performance bubble. Fourteen-year-olds sign development deals while 18-year-olds get contracts worth six figures. By the time they’re 30, many have lived out their childhood dreams in front of national TV audiences and yet remain, in the traditional sense, unqualified for anything else. Elite sport is no longer an extracurricular pursuit but an all-consuming career.
The upside is clear – better pathways, increased opportunities, more money and higher-quality sport – but the downside is just as stark. Because what happens when it’s over? And it will be over. Careers remain brutally short, and one injury, coaching change or bad season can leave a player staring down the barrel of a life outside of sport for the first time.
Something else has shifted in the past decade, however. The world waiting for retired athletes has exploded into a sprawling ecosystem of media, business, entrepreneurship and content creation. Once upon a time, a handful of former superstars became commentators or coaches while everyone else disappeared into regular jobs.
Now, every second player has a podcast. Some enter finance; some start their own companies; some build a personal brand so strong that people forget they were once athletes – does anyone remember that Dwayne Johnson’s first career was pro football? This is no coincidence. The rise of digital media has democratised the post-career landscape. You no longer need to be a premiership-winning captain to land a job – you just need a bit of personality, business acumen and a platform. Athletes – the most competitive humans alive – have seized that opportunity with alacrity.
Take Bryan Fletcher, a rugby league larrikin who practically fell into media after telling a few good yarns at a team dinner. Or Tom Mitchell, a Brownlow Medallist and premiership winner who turned a handful of training programs into one of the country’s most ambitious, athlete-led media networks. Or Carl Valeri, a former Socceroo who swapped the midfield for an executive role at an apparel company.
Their stories reveal an emerging truth that life after the final whistle needn’t pale against the high drama of what they’ve known. Indeed, what follows might be the most interesting chapter of all.
Tom Mitchell
WHILE TOM MITCHELL is still holding out hope that he can prolong his AFL career after being delisted by Collingwood at the end of the 2025 season, the scaffolding for the Brownlow Medallist and premiership winner’s future is already in place, because he had the foresight to plan ahead. In 2019, a year after winning the Brownlow as a Hawk, Mitchell broke his leg during training. The injury not only ended his season but also threatened his career. “That made me start to think about next steps,” he says. “Just in case things didn’t get back on track.” Injuries have a way of both distorting and clarifying our perceptions of the future. For Mitchell, suddenly, the idea of playing well into his thirties didn’t feel guaranteed.
At the time, Mitchell, like most elite athletes, was focused on the singular goal of becoming the best player he could be. “To be great you have to be super dedicated,” he says. “So, I understand why guys don’t think about what comes next.” The injury changed that for Mitchell, who began conceiving of ways to diversify his income streams. That’s where the idea for Ball Magnets came from.
Mitchell and a group of fellow AFL stars, including Patrick Cripps and Lachie Neale, co-founded Ball Magnets with a vision of it becoming a digital sports academy, providing workout plans and training programs for athletes. On the side, they also started the Ball Magnets podcast as a means of promoting their new app. Then, unexpectedly, that podcast quickly became the centrepiece of the business.
Today, Ball Magnets still functions as a training app and sports academy – it has also launched a line of apparel – but it’s perhaps better described as a multimedia network that stretches across multiple codes, with the podcast as its spearhead. “Part of the reason we called it Ball Magnets is that the name isn’t exclusive to AFL,” Mitchell explains. Basketball is already a pillar, thanks to burgeoning NBA star Josh Giddey joining as a partner. Further expansion is imminent, according to Mitchell, with cricket and soccer in his sights.
When he speaks to Esquire, Mitchell has just returned from a trip to the US, where he stayed with Giddey and fellow Australian NBA star Dyson Daniels while capturing Ball Magnets content courtside. It’s a sign of how much Ball Magnets has grown – and that there’s plenty more growth to come.
Mitchell insists the shift from athlete to media personality wasn’t so difficult. “Being an athlete myself, there are certain things I can relate to when I speak with other athletes,” he says. This isn’t the old model of retirement gigs and the occasional commentary spot. Ball Magnets is a strategic extension of an athlete’s brand, audience and influence.
Bryan Fletcher
BRYAN FLETCHER REPRESENTS the old guard insofar as he began playing high-level rugby league at a time when sport wasn’t widely seen as a viable career unless you were among the best of the best. The NSWRL/NRL of the ’90s wasn’t the full-on commercial juggernaut it is today. Pay was relatively modest, contracts were shorter and many players worked day jobs to pay their bills.
Fletcher never even intended to become a professional rugby league player, let alone a media personality. In fact, the idea would have seemed far-fetched to a teenage Fletcher, who left school after Year 10 to become a plumber. “I was a tradesman until I made my debut [for the Sydney Roosters] at 23,” he says. “I was playing footy on the weekend with my mates, but I really had no desire to play professionally.”
Fletcher agreed to a trial with the Roosters and suddenly found himself holding a contract. He would go on to represent Australia, play 14 games for NSW in State of Origin, win a premiership with the Roosters and captain the club he played junior footy for, the South Sydney Rabbitohs.
But rugby league careers don’t last forever. Even the best players are forced to consider what they’ll do next once they hit their thirties. For Fletcher, that realisation came after he left Australia to play in England’s Super League in 2006. “I had a year left on my contract and thought, Shit, what am I actually going to do?” he says. He knew one thing for sure, and that was that he didn’t want to go back to plumbing. So, he started making calls to friends and got a job with a cleaning company. “I didn’t know anything about it,” he laughs, “but that’s what I started doing.”
If this sounds light years away from the media personality he is today, that’s because it was. Fletcher’s second career was born the same way as his first: by chance. The Roosters were holding a Team of the Century dinner and Fletcher, several beers deep, was invited on stage to tell a few yarns. In the audience that night was someone high up at Fox Sports who liked what he saw. “He obviously thought I was pretty good,” Fletcher says. “He gave me a call, and I started doing fill-ins, panel shows . . . that’s where it all started.”
Fletcher would go on to host the ‘Kick for Cash’ segment on The Footy Show and form a comedic duo with former Parramatta Eels captain Nathan Hindmarsh. He now appears on The Late Show with Matty Johns and is on the airwaves daily for SEN Radio Sydney.
Now 51, Fletcher acknowledges that he was lucky to fall into a second career in media, and says young players today need to have a back-up plan in case their dreams don’t pan out. “The average NRL career is only 32 games,” he says. “For all the Darren Lockyers and Nathan Clearys of the world, there are hundreds, even thousands, who will only be in the league for one or two years or not even make it there.”
The NRL is striving to ensure its young players are setting themselves up for success outside of football. Under-20s players who aren’t part of a club’s top-30 roster must be studying or completing a trade, but as Fletcher says, many 18-year-olds aren’t thinking about life after 30. “All you’re thinking about is being a first grader,” he says. “It’s not until you’re older that you think, God, I’m in my thirties and I haven’t done any studying.”
Fletcher’s story is unique. But his path does reveal one avenue to success: showing up, saying yes and making the most of every opportunity.
Carl Valeri
FIFTY-TWO-CAP SOCCEROO Carl Valeri always thought he would play long enough that the future could wait. He never had a plan B. “I dreamt of playing at a World Cup and doing all the things I got to do,” he says. “I am in a small category of athletes who have achieved their dreams.”
But even the dreamers eventually wake up. And for Valeri, that moment came in his early thirties when the magnitude of life after football began to sink in. Unlike many athletes, Valeri made a proactive decision and went back to university to study. He completed an MBA while still playing and leaned heavily on his football connections to build a professional network beyond the sport. “I used my network of football to build a network outside of football,” he says.
Today, Valeri is the head of football at iAthletic, an Australian sports apparel brand that provides jerseys for Basketball Australia, Basketball New Zealand, multiple NBL teams and a slew of football clubs around the country. It’s a role he never imagined for himself. “I never thought I’d be working in sports apparel and retail management,” he says.
It did make some sense, though. The founders of iAthletic are former athletes and Valeri says they spoke his language. But, more importantly, the role allows him to combine his passions for business and football. “It gives me the ability to be in football almost 24/7,” Valeri says. His days are spent speaking with clubs, federations and global partners; he also serves as a non-executive director on the board at his former club, Melbourne Victory.
Valeri’s story is one of success, but as he says, unless athletes are take-charge about their futures, they risk putting themselves at a disadvantage. “There’s a dark side where people get taken advantage of,” he says. “A lot of athletes are sacrificing a lot to make sport a career, but they’re not in the same earning bracket as the stars.”
For those players, retiring means more than leaving the game; it means starting from zero. That’s an area where Valeri believes more needs to be done. “Our players’ union is doing a lot of good work,” he says, “but there needs to be a lot more chat about how we can prepare young athletes for the future.”
When Valeri retired from football, he expected to feel untethered. Instead, he felt relief. “I always had to be the hardest-working guy in the team,” he says. “After 17 years of carrying that responsibility, plus leadership responsibilities, it was a lot of pressure. That’s something I didn’t fully realise until I retired.”
Suddenly, he didn’t have to wake up sore, be the first to training and push his body through yet another session. “By the end of my career, I hated going to training,” he admits. The transition wasn’t easy, but it has paid off. It shows that an athlete’s retirement, done well, can be an evolution rather than a collapse.
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