The Breakdown | Life after rugby: as game feels pinch, players face demanding transition

The final number of casualties is not quite confirmed but it is guaranteed to hurt. According to Christian Day, general secretary of the Rugby Players’ Association, at least 100 current Premiership squad members will shortly be left without a contract, victims of the stark financial realities gripping the English club game. “The market is incredibly squeezed,” says Day. “We’re looking at 10 senior players per squad not being there next year.”

Maybe one or two will be fortunate and find a summer trial somewhere. The implications of the Premiership’s reduced £5m salary cap, however, threaten to wreck a lot of dreams. Some clubs have been shedding truckloads of academy pros, others have made derisory offers that no full-time athlete could reasonably accept. “The last two years have been the most testing and challenging for rugby union as a professional sport since the early days when everyone was flying blind,” says Day. “We’re trying to help with that.”

But even as Day spells out his determination to negotiate for a proper minimum wage and a benevolent fund for past players, a much bigger truth is increasingly hard to ignore. There is foolhardy and then there is the bone-headed stupidity of those who think pro rugby alone will set them up for life. Rarely has there been a worse time to put all your eggs in rugby’s increasingly wobbly basket.

To the RPA’s credit, things have come on slightly since Day started as a young pro in 2003. Back then there was barely any support or pastoral care for those suddenly deemed surplus to requirements. This year 91% of players in the league expressed an interest in developing themselves beyond rugby and 62% of those enrolled on educational or vocational courses. More than 100 education grants have also been approved to help players prepare for life outside the dressing room bubble.

In many ways, though, that is the easy bit. Tick the box and on we go. Rather harder for those tiptoeing back into the real world is to replicate the weekly adrenaline rush to which they have become addicted. Or, tougher still, to peel back the layers of their institutionalised past and find something that might yield lasting happiness and long-term fulfilment.

Luckily there are people like Geoff Griffiths around to offer a helping hand. In a former life, Griffiths played in the back three for, among others, Blackheath, Esher, Plymouth Albion, Rotherham and Bedford. These days he is the owner and chief executive of the digital marketing agency Builtvisible and also specialises in assisting players who find themselves at a crossroads in their lives.

Together with his sister Nicola, a clinical psychologist, he has launched Tackling Transition to help professional athletes to take control of their transition out of sport. He reckons there remains a significant need for it. “I’ve got a couple of retired Premiership players who say they wish there was something like this before. One of them was bumbling his way through in a dead-end job that he didn’t really care about. Another told me he felt like he was just an academy player again. One minute he’d been playing in front of 80,000 people for Harlequins, the next he was stuck in an office somewhere.”

Everyone knows playing rugby cannot last for ever but, equally, it is possible to be pigeonholed once you stop. “What happens in rugby, in particular, is that people get pushed into finance or brokerage … things where you’re classically going to be good at because of your transferable skills.” But what if they had thought about things a little bit more and stopped to consider what their real passion might be? Acting? Writing? One of Griffiths’s former teammates is the BBC’s Ukraine correspondent James Waterhouse, with whom he played at Rotherham, Plymouth and Esher. Another is Ben Mercer, author of the excellent rugby book Fringes. All of them were sufficiently smart to understand the need to look beyond rugby even when they were fully immersed in it.

Something else Griffiths mentions strikes a chord. He spent eight years playing in the Championship and National One and reckons the best times he had were at Blackheath in National One. “I had a balance because I was building a career and using rugby as an escape rather than it being all-consuming. As a result I played better rugby. Being more well-rounded is obviously of enormous benefit and will actually improve your performance because you can switch off. A more balanced person is a better athlete.”

It became obvious to him, too, that players from Premiership clubs who pitched up on loan often fell into one of two categories: those who made the effort to engage and socialise and those who were simply marking time. “You knew the ones who would be successful people and you knew the ones who were chasing a rugby career. The former are doing better now than the ones who maybe got a handful of Premiership starts but were never going to be world-beaters. The interesting thing with rugby is that the financials aren’t really good enough to justify being all-in. Who’s making forever money in rugby?”

It is among the lessons he now tries to pass on, to avoid players ending up completely lost. “When [France’s] Christophe Dominici passed away in 2020 it really brought it home. I don’t think that’s the norm but there are countless stories of people struggling after their career is over. I think psychology is becoming a bigger thing on the performance side but there is a gap when a player’s career ends. Brutally, that’s not something the clubs are tasked with doing.”

Which is why Griffiths wants to try to alert them to their hidden potential. “I was talking to another guy who has just retired from the Premiership. He was saying that a lot of stuff around transition comes across as very negative. We want it to be a positive. The empowerment thing is massive. The better you understand yourself while you’re in rugby, the better armed and equipped you are. And the sooner you do something the better. Anything’s better than it being too late.” Plenty to ponder there, even for those still clinging to a Premiership contract.

In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, Mental Health America is available on 800-273-8255. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978