“Football Still Puts Food on My Table”: Exploring the Positive Narratives of Former Amateur and Semi-Professional Footballers in Nigeria

Pre-professional career termination has attracted considerable interest in football research. Research attention has mostly been on the difficulties that players may face in navigating the transition to a post-football life. However, “the excessive focus on the pathologies” may obscure the many different ways that the aspired career may contribute to the athlete's post-football well-being. Through a positive psychology approach, this paper explored the narrative frames through which former amateur and semi-professional players in Nigeria articulate a positive experience of their pursuit of a professional career, irrespective of the unrealized objective of becoming professional footballers. The findings reveal three positive narrative frames arising from connections that study participants made between their football pursuits and their post-football well-being. These include the narrative of livelihood, the narrative of purpose and the narrative of recognition. The implication of the findings is that amateur and semi-professional clubs need to be more deliberate in providing players with a range of experiences that may support a more positive post-football life narrative.