What kinds of psychological struggles can athletes face? Originally answered on August 25th, 2015
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Answer by Greg Gordon, consultant, football scout, and journalist:
The first thing I can think of is paranoia. Sports stars are constantly being judged, being sorted into hierarchies and positions within pecking orders, and all of it is built on a house of cards. Today's hero is tomorrow's bum, and they are all just an injury, a loss of form, a new boss, or a change in perception away from a critical loss of status, earnings, and opportunity.
Related to this is the wariness that is born from the opportunity cost associated with playing top level sports. Typically sports people feel their sacrifices weigh heavy on them in terms of their perceived lack of education and their breadth of life experience outside their bubble. The paradox is that while they're misssing out on a simpler teenage and early 20s life, a lot of people envy their opportunities to travel, earn lump sums of cash and experience an exclusive lifestyle that can be parlayed into worthwhile opportunities now and later.
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Equally, civilians don't really understand sports stars' situations with any kind of empathy, and even if they could trust others, it is more straightforward simply to mix only within their own world, limiting contact with outsiders. But this is obviously both isolating and limiting as a social life.
Injuries and fears of the future can loom large too, and then there's the reality of a short career and the need to make a second life when the floodlights fade. Many are unable to manage the transition.
For others the pressure of keeping going is hard to deal with. The fact is that sports kids will have 'worked' from their early years (aged 5-8 probably). There's the reality then that, like us all, they can easily fall out of love with things they once loved when they were younger. But in the sports star's case they can be trapped by the golden handcuffs of a lucrative career that they no longer enjoy but feel that they can't walk away from. For the rest of us that can happen much later when we're mature enough and secure enough to manage a midlife career change. That's harder to do as a 25-year-old Premiership footballer like, say, Michael Johnson: Fallen Giants: Michael Johnson, for example.