Football seems to get the boot against other jobs
Post by (ugg boots schweiz) Jan 2011
The annual Adecco children's career survey released this month revealed that kids here want most to be professional footballers when they grow up - not doctors or lawyers.
But the harsh reality of the domestic football scene has seen footballers leave the game for other professions: The younger ones generally going in search of greater remuneration, with the older hands looking for job security.
Faizal Hamid was a Singapore international who hung up his boots while in the prime of his career. By the time he was 27, in 2007, he had made the right-back slot in Radojko Avramovic's team his own.
But he quit the game a year later.
Speaking to MediaCorp on Friday, he said: "There's a lack of job security in football. What happens if you get a serious injury, or when your playing career is over?"
Now an officer in the Prisons Service, Faizal knows he missed out on a potentially bigger salary as a professional footballer.
But, he said: "I spoke to the older players before I quit and they told me it'll be the best decision I make in my life, and now I believe it was."
Another former player, who declined to be named, claimed it was the poor earning power of a local football professional that pushed him out.
Earning a $300 allowance in his first year in the Prime League squad of a local club, when there were others on $100; the player, a diploma holder, was promised $1,800 when he completed his National Service.
He chose to leave and is now a senior executive in the private sector.
"It is hard to sustain a living on those wages, I can't be earning that kind of money when I have a family and bills to pay," he said.
"There's no real job progression. You'll have to wait a whole year before there's even a chance of increments and contracts are mostly signed for one year. What happens if you get injured?"
S-League rules stipulate that Prime League players' salaries are capped at $300, with two players allowed to be paid up to $800 in what is termed a "monthly allowance" for expenses such as travel and meals.
But MediaCorp understands that some clubs pay as low as $100 to these players.
Former Young Lions defender Fabian Tan, 26, said it was a factor when he decided to hang up his boots last year, choosing a job as a ship broker with Maersk Broker.
"Being a footballer was a dream for me since I was in primary school, and playing in the S-League has helped me grow as a person," he said. "It was very hard to give up but there were only two jobs that could have pulled me away, and being a ship broker was one of them.
"You can only play till your mid-30s but you'll lose out on other career pursuits."
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