When the career ends: who you are when you’re no longer an athlete

The last match was on Saturday. On Sunday there were still hugs, a team photo and a cake in the changing room. On Monday at six in the morning the alarm he had forgotten to switch off went off. He got up, got dressed, picked up his bag — and stopped in the middle of the hallway, because there was nowhere he had to be.

Many former athletes describe a moment like this, including those who decided to stop themselves and planned it for a long time. People around them expect relief: at last you’ll have time, at last you can eat what you like, at last a summer holiday. And some of that relief really does come. But along with it often comes something nobody is prepared for — emptiness, restlessness, a feeling that you have lost not just a job, but yourself.

In this post I want to explain why the end of a sporting career is often so hard, why the difference between a voluntary and a forced ending matters so much, why it makes sense to talk about it as grief, and how an identity that isn’t only athletic is slowly built. I write from the perspective of psychotherapy — as a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision, not as a sport psychologist or a careers adviser. What interests me is the person who remains when the number on the start list is gone.

More than a job

Most people change jobs several times in their lives. It can hurt, but it rarely means losing everything at once: your daily rhythm, your friends, the body you knew, your public image, the goal that shaped every decision, and the answer to the question “who are you?”

For an elite athlete, that is exactly what happens. Often since childhood, sport has decided when they get up, what they eat, who they spend time with, where they travel and how they spend the summer. It set the frame for every day and every year. When it ends, it isn’t just one activity that drops away. It is the scaffolding on which everything else hung.

Research confirms this with figures too. A meta-analysis summarising studies on the mental health of elite athletes found symptoms of anxiety or depression in around 26 per cent of former elite athletes (Gouttebarge et al., 2019). That doesn’t mean one in four falls ill after their career. But it does mean that life after sport isn’t automatically easier, as we often imagine.

Hercules’ muscles or Achilles heel

In 1993 Britton Brewer, Judy Van Raalte and Darwyn Linder published an article with a telling title: Athletic identity: Hercules’ muscles or Achilles heel? They described athletic identity — how strongly a person identifies with the role of athlete — and developed a scale that is still used to measure it today.

Their finding cut both ways. A strong athletic identity is an asset: it supports commitment, persistence and hard work. Someone who sees themselves as an athlete will find it easier to get up at six and go training in the rain. But the same identity becomes a vulnerability when sport stops — because of injury, deselection or the end of a career. The more concentrated a person’s sense of who they are in a single role, the more losing that role shakes them.

I have written briefly about identity in general in the knowledge base under identity. For athletes, the main point is this: identity isn’t one thing, but a web of roles and stories. If you have more threads, it is easier to bear one of them snapping.

A voluntary or a forced ending

In 1994 Jim Taylor and Bruce Ogilvie proposed a model of adaptation to retirement from sport that is still used in research today. They distinguish four main reasons for an ending: age, deselection, injury and free choice. What matters above all is how much control the person had over when and how their career ended.

Someone who decided for themselves had time to say goodbye. They may have played their last season consciously, thinking “this is the last time”. They said goodbye to team-mates, to the arena, to the fans. Even if it is hard afterwards, that story has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Someone who had to stop because of injury, or because they were no longer selected, often had no farewell. The last match wasn’t the last because they chose it, but because something happened. Then, alongside sadness, there is often anger, guilt and an endless loop of “what if”. What if I’d had that knee checked earlier? What if I’d trained differently that season? What if the coach had believed in me?

A review of research on career transitions out of sport (Park et al., 2013) showed that those with a very strong athletic identity, those who had to stop unexpectedly and those with less support tended to have a harder transition. It was easier for those who had prepared for the end, who had kept up education or other interests during their career and who had people around them they could talk to.

This is grief

When former athletes describe how they felt, they often use words we usually hear after the death of someone close: emptiness, disbelief, anger, longing, a sense that others have moved on while you are stuck. That is no coincidence. The end of a career is a loss, and we respond to loss with grieving.

But it is a grief that the people around you often don’t acknowledge. After all, nobody died. You’re healthy, young, you have a family, maybe even money. What are you complaining about? This kind of grief is called disenfranchised grief, and I have written more about it in The grief nobody acknowledges: miscarriage, divorce, losing a job. When those around you don’t acknowledge a loss, you often don’t acknowledge it yourself either. You push the sadness aside because you’re ashamed of it — and that pushed-aside sadness later shows up as irritability, drinking or a quiet numbness.

It also helps to know that grief doesn’t move through tidy stages. It isn’t that you first deny, then get angry, then bargain and finally accept. Waves come and go. You can be fine for months, and then footage of an old match or the smell of a sports hall knocks you sideways. I have written about why the stages of grief are more myth than map in The stages of grief are a myth: what really happens after a loss.

A body that doesn’t know it’s over

An athlete isn’t just an identity in the head. They are also a body that has adapted to heavy loads for years. That body doesn’t know it is over. It still wakes up at training time, it is still as hungry as before, it still expects its daily dose of exertion and that particular tiredness after which sleep is deep.

When that is gone, many people feel restless and irritable, sleep badly and put on weight, which triggers yet more shame — especially in sports where weight was part of the result. The body that was a tool and a source of pride becomes something you no longer recognise.

That is why it makes sense, in the first months after your career ends, not to look after your head alone. A new, gentler physical routine — not training for results, but movement that does you good — helps regulate sleep and mood. If changes in weight, sleep or mood don’t settle, it is worth talking to a doctor. And keep an eye on alcohol: in former athletes, drinking that used to be limited by the season can quietly grow when there is no longer a next training session to stop it.

Relationships after a career

The end of a career doesn’t only affect the athlete. It affects their family too. A partner who was used for years to the other being away a lot now has to find a shared rhythm all over again. Parents who were proud of their child’s successes may grieve in their own way. Children get a father or mother who is home more, but may be more absent than before.

That is why a conversation in therapy often starts with sport and quickly arrives at relationships (a composite conversation, not a real person):

“Everyone tells me I should be glad I have time now.”
“And what do you feel?”
“That I’m surplus to requirements. I wake up at six like always, and nobody is waiting for me.”
“Who was waiting for you before?”
“The coach. The team. Actually … everyone.”
“And now?”
A long silence. “Now my wife is waiting for me. But I don’t know how to tell her it isn’t enough. Because it should be.”

There is a lot of shame in that sentence. And a lot of love for a wife he doesn’t want to hurt. In relational family therapy, in which I am training, I would be interested in what happens between the two of them when he carries this distress alone. His wife may feel him drifting away and read it as rejection. He withdraws even further because he can’t tell her what is troubling him. So sometimes the most useful thing is for them to come to therapy together — not because the relationship is in crisis, but because everything that held it up has changed.

A similar dynamic can appear with any big change, even ones we want. I wrote about why they knock us off balance in Why change knocks us off balance, even when it is good change.

A new identity isn’t built overnight

When the first wave passes, the question that is often hardest opens up: who am I now? Developmental psychology calls this a transition — a period when the old no longer applies and the new hasn’t yet taken shape. A transition isn’t a fault in life, but a normal part of it. For athletes, though, it often comes earlier than for their peers, and more publicly.

David Lavallee and Hannah Robinson talked to former elite gymnasts. They described how, after their careers ended, they felt they didn’t know who they were, because they had never had the chance to explore it. Sport had answered the question of identity in childhood, and for many years afterwards it never needed asking again (Lavallee and Robinson, 2007).

A new identity isn’t chosen from a catalogue. It is built slowly, from attempts that sometimes fail. Many former athletes stay in sport as coaches, commentators or officials, and for some that is the right path. For others it is a way of avoiding the question of who they are without sport — and that only becomes visible years later. There is no wrong path, but it helps to know why you choose what you choose.

It helps to ask yourself which of the things sport taught you are yours rather than sport’s. Persistence, teamwork, bearing disappointment, the ability to get up after a defeat — all of that stays. Only the place where you use it changes.

Exercise: a letter to your sport

This exercise is meant above all for those who never got to say goodbye — but it helps others too. Give yourself half an hour and do it in writing, on paper.

1. Write a letter to your sport as if you were writing to a person. Begin with “Dear …” and tell it what it gave you. Not just medals — friends too, moments you remember, the feeling when everything clicked.
2. Tell it what it took from you as well. Missed birthdays, injuries, a youth that passed between training sessions. The letter isn’t honest if it is only grateful.
3. Write down what you didn’t manage to tell it when it ended. If the end was sudden, this is the place for anger and for “what if”.
4. Finally, write what you take with you — one or two qualities or insights that remain yours even when you no longer train.
5. Read the letter aloud — on your own or to someone you trust. Notice at which sentence your voice catches. That is probably where something still needs space.

You don’t have to show the letter to anyone. You can keep it, burn it, or read it again in a year’s time and see what has changed.

The end of a career has a lot in common with other losses that have nothing to do with death: losing your health or losing the plan you had for your life. If you are interested in how people cope with them, read Loss of health: when a diagnosis changes your whole future and Losing the plan: when life doesn’t unfold the way you thought. A similar question opens up at retirement, which I wrote about in Retirement, the loss of a role and the question of meaning — except that athletes face it thirty years earlier.

Where this doesn’t apply

I wouldn’t want to give the impression that the end of a career is a tragedy for everyone. It isn’t.

Many people cope with it well. Research shows that most former athletes, after a period of transition, find a new rhythm and a new direction. Some feel mainly relief at the end — because their body hurt, because the pressure exhausted them, or because they had long wanted a different life. If that is how you feel, there is nothing wrong with you, and you don’t need to go looking for sadness that isn’t there.

Not every sadness is an illness. Hurting for a few months, missing the team and not knowing what to do with yourself is a normal response to a big loss. It doesn’t need a diagnosis and doesn’t necessarily need therapy. Often it helps just to talk about it with people who have been through the same thing.

But sometimes it is more than grief. If after several months nothing is better, if you can’t sleep, if you lose interest in everything, if you are drinking more than you would like, or if thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, the first port of call is a doctor or psychiatrist. With thoughts of death, don’t wait: in Slovenia call 112, the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day).

And I am not a careers adviser. For questions such as education, employment or finances after your career, better places to turn are careers advisers, athlete programmes run by federations and Olympic committees, or sport psychologists who work with transitions. Psychotherapy is the space for what remains once those questions are answered — or when you can’t answer them because something else is holding you back.

How to help someone who has stopped

If you are the partner, parent or friend of someone who has just ended their career, the most important thing is this: don’t rush to comfort them. Sentences like “well, now you’ll have time” or “be glad you’re healthy” are well meant, but they convey that sadness is out of place.

It helps more to ask what they miss. And to listen to the answer, even when it repeats itself. To invite them to things that have nothing to do with sport, without pushing. To notice when they withdraw or drink more than before, and to say so calmly, without reproach. And to let them be lost for a while without immediately trying to fix it.

You are allowed to feel the loss too. An athlete’s family has often lived by their schedule and celebrated their wins. Something has ended for you as well.

What to remember

• The end of a sporting career isn’t just a change of job — your rhythm, your team, the body you knew and the answer to who you are all fall away.
• A strong athletic identity helps during a career but becomes a vulnerability when sport stops (Brewer et al., 1993).
• A forced ending — injury or deselection — is usually harder than a voluntary one, because the sense of control and the farewell are missing.
• What follows is often grief that those around you don’t acknowledge. You are allowed to feel it.
• A new identity is built slowly — from the qualities sport gave you and from roles you haven’t yet dared to try.