“This is the part of players’ careers that doesn’t really get spoken about,” begins Sam Walker, goalkeeper for League Two Bradford City.
He is talking about the summer his daughter Sophia, then two and a half years old, had open-heart surgery. In the six months prior, Walker, now 33, had been playing for Kilmarnock and flying home twice a week to be with his family in Hertfordshire, “because I didn’t want to be apart from the children for that long”. Sophia’s illness meant that, after his contract expired, he lived off savings to “just be a dad and not worry about moving into the next contract”.
“I knocked back stuff that would have meant I’d be travelling,” he adds. “I just needed to be there for my daughter. It couldn’t have been forever, but I’m really grateful that I was able to.”
The Athletic spent October talking to footballers from across the men’s and women’s pyramids about, as Walker’s Bradford team-mate Jamie Walker puts it, “what people don’t see in football”. What is the life of a footballer outside the Premier League in 2024? What are their fears and anxieties? How do they build their lives and families amid changing clubs and a physically demanding career?
From finances and families to social media and mental health,…
