Footballers usually have a fairly predictable retirement menu: coaching, punditry, scouting, business, and perhaps a few television appearances where everyone discovers the former centre-back is considerably funnier than he was at 27.
Then there are the others.
Some former players walked away from the dressing room and into film studios, horse-racing yards, tattoo parlours, ice rinks and even the oddest jobs.
Somewhere along the way, football’s usual retirement script was politely thrown out of the window.
Here are 10 of the strangest careers former footballers pursued after hanging up their boots.
- 1. Daniel Agger – Tattoo Artist & Sewage Entrepreneur
- 2. Michael Owen – Major Figure In Horse Racing
- 3. Eric Cantona – Actor, Musician & Stage Performer
- 4. Petr Čech – Ice-hockey Goalkeeper
- 5. Vinnie Jones – Hollywood Actor
- 6. Gaizka Mendieta – DJ
- 7. Robbie Russell – Emergency-room Doctor
- 8. Faustino Asprilla – Condom Entrepreneur
- 9. Steve Lomas – Bed-and-breakfast Owner & Chef
- 10. George Weah – President of Liberia
1. Daniel Agger – Tattoo Artist & Sewage Entrepreneur
Agger spent his football career looking like the sort of defender who would rather clear a striker into Row Z than discuss feelings, so perhaps his post-football life should have surprised nobody.
It still did.
The former Liverpool and Denmark centre-back retired in 2016 at just 31 and pursued his long-standing interest in tattooing, eventually becoming involved with the tattoo platform and studio business Tattoodo.
Agger had already been developing the interest during his playing career, learning the craft and practising his designs before making it a much larger part of his life after football.
Then came the other business.
Agger invested in KloAgger, a Danish company involved in sewer and wastewater systems. The company’s name is a rather magnificent piece of Scandinavian wordplay, combining “Klo”, meaning sewer or toilet, with Agger’s surname.
Few former Premier League defenders can say they went from marking Luis Suárez to discussing drainage systems.
Agger later returned to football as a coach, taking charge of HB Køge, meaning his career after playing has somehow managed to contain tattoos, sewage and football management.
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2. Michael Owen – Major Figure In Horse Racing
Michael Owen’s post-football career makes more sense once you realise that horse racing was never really a retirement hobby for him.
The former Liverpool and England striker has loved racing since childhood, bought his first racehorse at 18 and purchased the Manor House property in Cheshire during his playing career.
In 2007, Manor House Stables officially opened as a training operation, beginning with a relatively modest string of horses before growing into a substantial racing business.
By 2026, the operation had grown dramatically, with Owen describing the yard as having around 135 horses and 50 staff.
His most famous horse, Brown Panther, won the Irish St Leger in 2014 and became the centrepiece of an operation that Owen has continued to develop long after leaving football.
There is something wonderfully familiar about the comparison.
Football gave Owen elite athletes, training schedules, recovery science and competition; horse racing gave him another set of athletes, only this time they had four legs and absolutely no interest in hearing his tactical instructions.
3. Eric Cantona – Actor, Musician & Stage Performer
Cantona retiring from football was always going to be an unusual event.
A man who once turned football into theatre was hardly going to spend his retirement quietly watching daytime television.
After leaving the game in 1997 at 30, Cantona built a second career in acting, appearing in French and British productions and eventually working with celebrated director Ken Loach on Looking for Eric.
His acting career became substantial enough that football stopped being the obvious answer whenever his name appeared on a film poster.
Then Cantona added music.
He released music, performed live and in 2024 embarked on a tour connected to his album Cantona Sings Eric. His musical work continued into 2026, when his EP and subsequent projects formed another chapter of an already eccentric second career.
The former Manchester United captain had gone from scoring at Old Trafford to appearing on stage with a microphone, which somehow feels completely appropriate for a man whose post-match interviews once sounded like fragments from a philosophical play.
4. Petr Čech – Ice-hockey Goalkeeper
Čech had already spent his career stopping footballs with his hands, so choosing another sport in which the goalkeeper’s job involves stopping things at frightening speed seems almost suspiciously logical
After retiring from professional football in 2019, Čech returned to one of his childhood sporting interests: ice hockey.
He joined Guildford Phoenix and made his competitive debut in the fourth tier of British ice hockey, attracting a crowd of around 900 people for a match that ordinarily would have expected a much smaller audience.
The contrast was glorious.
A man who had won the Champions League, four Premier League titles and five FA Cups was suddenly turning out in British lower-league hockey, wearing number 39 as a tribute to his childhood hockey hero Dominik Hašek.
Čech later played for the Chelmsford Chieftains, continuing his second sporting career as a netminder.
Most retired footballers talk about missing competition.
Čech found another one.
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5. Vinnie Jones – Hollywood Actor
Vinnie Jones did not exactly look destined for a career in ballet.
The former Wimbledon, Chelsea and Wales midfielder built his football reputation as one of the game’s most uncompromising characters, particularly during his time with Wimbledon’s famous Crazy Gang.
Then he walked into a film set.
Jones made his acting breakthrough in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998, shortly before the end of his playing career, and quickly established himself as a screen presence whose football reputation became part of his acting identity.
His career expanded into Hollywood, with roles in films including Snatch, Gone in 60 Seconds, X-Men: The Last Stand and The Condemned, alongside numerous television appearances.
His acting career has continued for decades, and in 2026 he remained a familiar face on screen.
There was a certain efficiency to the casting process. Hollywood needed a man who looked capable of threatening someone without raising his voice, and Jones arrived with a football CV that had already done half the audition.
6. Gaizka Mendieta – DJ
Mendieta was one of Europe’s most elegant midfielders during Valencia’s great era around the turn of the century, captaining the club to consecutive Champions League finals in 2000 and 2001.
After football, he found himself behind a different kind of set piece.
Mendieta became a DJ, developing an interest in electronic music and performing sets after his playing career ended.
He has also worked in football media and helped establish Player 4 Player, a collective designed to support current and former elite footballers, while running a restaurant in England.
The DJ career, however, remains the part that tends to make people look twice.
Mendieta’s football involved controlling rhythm, tempo, and space. His second career simply moved those responsibilities from a football pitch to a dance floor.
Different crowd, same obsession with timing.
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7. Robbie Russell – Emergency-room Doctor
Russell’s second career is less bizarre in the comic sense and more extraordinary because of the sheer amount of work required to make the switch.
The former D.C. United defender retired from professional soccer in 2013 after 13 years in the sport and decided to pursue medicine.
Russell completed a pre-med programme at Georgetown, attended George Washington University School of Medicine and later entered residency training in emergency medicine at the University of Virginia.
By 2020, he was working as a first-year emergency-medicine resident.
The leap from professional football to medicine required years of study, examinations and clinical training, making this one of the clearest examples of a player building an entirely separate professional identity rather than simply finding a new role within sport.
A former defender who spent Sundays dealing with opposing forwards eventually found himself dealing with patients arriving in an emergency department.
That is one heck of a career change.
8. Faustino Asprilla – Condom Entrepreneur
Asprilla was already one of football’s great characters before retirement, so his second career had a fairly high bar to clear.
Naturally, he cleared it.
The Colombian striker, famous for his spells with Parma and Newcastle United, launched his own condom brand in 2016, building the product around an infamous photograph from a 1993 Colombia match that had unintentionally revealed more of Asprilla than the photographer had planned.
The brand carried Asprilla’s name and a deliberately cheeky marketing campaign, including the slogan “el tamaño sí importa”.
The products came in different fragrances and varieties, turning one of football’s strangest off-field episodes into a business venture.
It was an unusual example of a former footballer taking an old piece of notoriety and converting it into commercial branding.
Asprilla had spent his playing career creating chaos in penalty areas.
After retirement, he apparently decided the advertising industry needed some of the same energy.
9. Steve Lomas – Bed-and-breakfast Owner & Chef
Steve Lomas won 45 caps for Northern Ireland and played in the Premier League for Manchester City and West Ham United, building the sort of football career that would usually lead naturally into coaching or television.
Instead, he ended up welcoming holidaymakers to County Antrim.
Lomas runs Causeway Guest Accommodation in Bushmills, a family-owned bed and breakfast located close to the Giant’s Causeway and Royal Portrush.
The former midfielder is involved in the day-to-day operation of the property and, according to recent reporting, prepares breakfast for guests himself.
There is something particularly charming about the change in working environment.
For years, Lomas operated in packed stadiums where thousands of people knew his name. Now the important questions involve room keys, breakfast orders and whether the guests would like another cup of tea.
Football retirement does not always mean leaving pressure behind.
Sometimes it means discovering that a guest has very strong opinions about scrambled eggs.
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10. George Weah – President of Liberia
Even the most imaginative football retirement list has difficulty producing an ending more dramatic than George Weah’s.
The Liberian striker retired from professional football in 2003 after an extraordinary career that included Monaco, Paris Saint-Germain, AC Milan, Chelsea, Manchester City and Marseille.
He had won the Ballon d’Or in 1995, becoming the first and, for many years, only African winner of the award.
Then he entered politics.
Weah was elected to Liberia’s Senate before winning the country’s presidency in 2017, taking office in January 2018 and serving until 2024.
He remains the only former professional footballer to have become president of Liberia and the first African former professional footballer to become a head of state.
The distance between scoring at San Siro and standing behind a presidential podium is enormous, even by football’s generous standards.
Weah managed to cross it.
Other Notable Mentions
- Stuart Tomlinson – Professional Wrestler
- Curtis Woodhouse – Boxing
- Stuart Tomlinson – WWE Wrestler
- Fabian Barthez – Racing Driver
- José Manuel Pinto – Grammy-Winning Music Producer
- Philip Mulryne – Catholic Priest
- Arjan de Zeeuw – Investigative Detective
- Mathieu Flamini – Biochemical Entrepreneur
- Thomas Gravesen – Professional Poker Player
