Dean Windass can still remember the first time he didn’t have to get up for training. While his team-mates, fresh back from their summer holidays, trudged in for day one of a gruelling pre-season schedule, the then 41-year-old stayed tucked up in bed.
A few months earlier, the striker had played his final professional match, calling time on a two-decade career that took in 10 clubs, including spells in the Premier League and Scotland’s top flight. Windass scored more than 200 goals and had lived the dream at hometown team Hull City, where he’s still idolised to this day. Understandably, he had never wanted it to end.
“I prolonged my playing days for as long as I could,” Windass, now aged 53, tells FFT. “I never took being a footballer for granted. At 20, I swapped working on building sites for an apprenticeship at Hull and always had that other path – the one I didn’t take – at the back of my mind. I enjoyed every single moment because I knew it easily may not have happened. But 20 years goes by very quickly. I really didn’t want to retire, but we all have to at some stage.”
It’s a sentiment that will be so familiar to many. Coming to terms with life after football is hard, as Mark Crossley, a veteran of more than 500 games for clubs such as Fulham, Middlesbrough and Nottingham Forest can attest. “I had no plan at all,” he explains to . “Football tells you where to be, what to do, when to be there, what to eat, when to eat it, what time the coach is leaving, what time we’re reporting for pre-season, where we’re going for pre-season. Then it all goes overnight. I got up one morning to drive to work, and I wasn’t even
