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Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids. In actual fact the UK currently h
by fergie 9y ago
Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids.
In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades.
The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to those positions for a lifetime.
So there are more professors than footballers at any one time, but due to football's higher turnover, and shorter tenure, many more people will be a footballer than a professor over the course of their career.
The bottom line is that professional football is actually a relatively attainable goal for young British men, and should probably be more encouraged as a realistic career option.
...and when you do put in your application to Oxford, Cambridge, Google, or Facebook, your long-gone 3 year stint as a utility midfielder at Dundee United is only going to make it more interesting.
- danieltillett 9y agoVery interesting observation. I should do the equivalent comparison for Australia.
- girvo 9y agoFor Rugby Union, the path to playing in Super Rugby is surprisingly short. I became a first-grade Union referee pretty much by accident, without really putting much time into it aside from the weekends. The ARB actually asked me to become a professional referee, but didn't realise how young I was at the time. A shame that I never followed through on it, really.
- arethuza 9y agoIs that the UK or US definition of "Professor" though? I've noticed some UK universities have started using additional titles of Assistant/Associate Professor as well as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader.
- fergie 9y agoIf that is the case, I have over-represented the pool of professors, which strengthens the point
- michaelt 9y agoIf you're pursuing pro football, don't you have to neglect your schooling to compete with the other players? If so, doesn't that close more doors than the academic route, where you can take your degree/masters/phd to industry any time you like?
- VLM 9y agoThere's always tradeoffs; serious academic pursuit means neglecting physical fitness and life goals (relationships and fun and such). Its easier to recover from time lost on the sportsball path than time lost on the academic path.
- crispyambulance 9y agoEveryone makes sacrifices. There are reasons why pro athletes retire in their 30's. Aside from deterioration of performance, injuries start to take their toll. On the other hand nothing stops an academic from staying reasonably fit-- not enough to win races, perhaps, but easily enough to not suffer from sedentary ailments. Relationships are difficult for anyone that pursues extreme success, athlete or academic.
- ced 9y agoTrue, but there's probably 10 times more young men who would like to be professional footballers than professors.
- kerbalspacepro 9y agoBut both are probably strongly determined by genetics, so the size of the people that "want" something probably isn't entirely relevant. It's the people that have the natural talent under the people that can do the work.
- onan_barbarian 9y agoI'm going to guess that the logic behind your 'relatively attainable goal' here is 90% dependent on the fact that far more people can aspire to be a footballer than a professor, due to the general requirement for a PhD. I would think the pool of people aspiring to be footballers is orders of magnitude larger. They've also been weeding themselves out from doing something that's pretty much exactly the task ("playing football at a slightly younger age against somewhat less good players") for a while - while future-professor-types may well have been doing a range of activities only weakly correlating to future success in the academy.
- gideon_b 9y agoIt's a trend in sales to hire retired professional athletes. Google famously hired a cohort of olympic athletes for their Adwords sales team.