Being frozen out at a football club is ‘professional trauma’ akin to a partner leaving

Imagine you are a footballer – and not just any footballer, an elite one, an elite footballer who has suddenly found yourself given the cold shoulder, informed you are surplus to requirements, encouraged to get yourself some game time, only at another club. Imagine you are that footballer. What would you do next?

Football fans are used to seeing exhibitions of player power in 2016; the sulk, the transfer request, the unattributed remarks in the press. But the other side of the dynamic, where the clubs exert their power, happens many times more frequently.

This summer a spate of players has been given the cold shoulder – from Joe Hart, passing the hours in his back garden working on his passing game, to Saido Berahino, now celebrating the one-year anniversary of his Jeremy Peace tweet, and Bastian Schweinsteiger wondering if it could really be only two years ago that he was kissing the World Cup. As the sash cords on the transfer window continue to be reeled in, these players will be getting ready for some awkward conversations.

“As much as the player might dig his heels in,” says an agent with Premier League clients who wishes to remain nameless, “the reality is that, if a club want someone out, they can make it difficult for them.” This includes applying such time-honoured techniques as making a player train with the kids and will often happen when a new manager enters a club. “If it’s the start of a new reign and the manager is reluctant to commit to a player, it’s a strong sign,” he says.

An agent’s job is then to source alternatives and put them to a client, with the emphasis on one thing: money. “Any agent worth his salt would sit down with his client and put all the options on the table,” the agent says. “If the money’s the same and it’s all about football, he’ll want to work. If the offers that come in don’t match up, he faces a tougher choice. A year not playing is really damaging to your career, really damaging. By the time your contract comes to an end, you won’t be able to get the same amount of money.”

Despite this risk, however, the agent is confident he knows which choice most players would make when faced with taking a pay cut. “It’s the player that makes the decision,” he says. “For sure, they’d think strategically but, ultimately, they won’t leave for less money to play.”

If that seems a particularly unsentimental approach to pursuing a career in the sport you love, then welcome to modern football. But while players might be taking business decisions in a hard-nosed manner, that does not mean that feelings of vulnerability are not bubbling away underneath.

Professor Dave Collins is the director of the Institute of Coaching and Performance at the University of Central Lancashire. A former head of performance at UK Athletics, he has worked with Olympians as well as professional sportsmen to deal with the psychological impacts of injury and retirement. Being forced out of a club against your will is not a dissimilar experience, he says.

“It is a professional trauma. One day you’re something and the next day, in your eyes, you’re damn all,” he says, drawing the parallel between a football club and a lover. “Imagine that you’ve been in a very high-maintenance relationship and been committed to it. Imagine someone tells you it’s over and you don’t want it over. You’ll feel that you’re no longer one of the in-crowd. All of a sudden people around stop acknowledging you, people stop calling you up. When that’s a big part of your identity, the trauma you experience will be close to a bereavement.”

Collins says the role of the sports psychologist is increasingly important in helping athletes move on from disappointment. “If I’m retained by a club or squad and a guy gets cut, I consider it part of my responsibility to look after them,” he says. “It’s important that people who are coming in see how you treat people on the way out. Part of the job would be to rationalise the emotions being experienced. Say that you’re 45 and your wife has left you. You think you’ll never meet someone again but the third part doesn’t follow from the first two. A player thinks: ‘I’ve been at a top club, now I’m surplus to requirement, that means I’m not good enough.’ Again, it doesn’t follow. To rationalise what’s gone on is important.”

While the agent is working out a deal and the psychologist is conducting a debrief, there is one more crucial role in managing a player out of a club. Player liaison officers are a new breed of sporting executive whose job is to make sure a professional footballer has to lift only the fingers he wants to. And they are the ones who will finally see a player off the premises.

“You have a duty of care to a player no matter what’s happened,” says one officer, again speaking anonymously. “You’ve built a relationship with them and, if you’re in this profession, you’re a caring person anyway.”

One area of particular attention is property. A liaison officer may be needed to help negotiate the end of a lease or put a house on the market. They might take one recently vacated property and pass it to a new signing. They might even be required to go through a flat with a bin bag.

“I have had examples where players leave and they say: ‘I’m not interested in any of this stuff,’” the officer says. “They’ll say: ‘I’ve got this television and I don’t want to take it to Uzbekistan’ or whatever. In fact, people can just walk out and leave everything. They leave a house permanently and it can look like they’ve just gone out for the day.”

And in that way, the cycle of sporting life continues. For every Joe Hart, there is a Claudio Bravo and in football there is little time for sentiment. “You do try to manage them out of the club and town as best you can,” the officer says. “But still there is always an element of ‘the king is dead, long live the king’.”