Net profits: the ex-footballers winning in business

When they walk on to the pitch at the Arena da Amazônia in Manaus to face Italy tomorrow, many England players know it will mark the beginning of the end of a chapter in their career. Frank Lampard has left Chelsea and looks set to join New York City FC, part-owned by Manchester City, on a lucrative one-year deal. Steven Gerrard is unlikely to play in another World Cup, nor, the way things are going, is Wayne Rooney. Some who had expected to go to Brazil have missed the cut and quit international football, notably Chelsea’s John Terry and Ashley Cole. There’s no extra time for footballers these days.

In the past, retiring players all too often followed the career advice of George Best: ‘I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. I used to go missing a lot... Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World.’ It’s easy to see why. The average Premier League footballer earns £1.6m a year according to Deloitte’s latest Annual Review of Football Finance. When they retire it’s not just the five- or six-figure weekly pay checks that stop arriving; the lucrative sponsorship deals and image rights contracts dry up, too. Image rights generally account for 10 to 25 per cent of a player’s contract, while Rooney’s lucrative sponsorship deals with Nike and Samsung earn him £1.8m a year. When the game’s up, the pressure is on to diversify, fast, but most players have little experience outside football and in many cases few formal educational or business qualifications.

Michael Owen, who scored what many consider to be the best England goal ever, against Argentina in France 1998, has felt the problems players encounter when they hang up their boots. ‘It’s difficult when you retire because you go through bigger highs and lows than most and you’ve been thrust into a life that isn’t normal. Some get sucked into this totally false world and can end up in a mess.’

But things are changing. Big salaries on the pitch — thanks to Sky and BT’s television cash and sponsorship deals — have created a more business-like attitude off the pitch. Take former Leeds and England defender Danny Mills, 37. Having been invited to join the FA’s commission assessing football improvements in the English game last year, the polymath also became a partner in the £7.5m private equity outfit Enact. The firm, which invests in struggling small- and medium-sized businesses, recently hit the headlines when it bought the West Cornwall Pasty Company out of administration, saving 274 jobs at 34 stores. The footballer, who retired five years ago after a knee injury and went on to make the final of the 2012 series of Celebrity MasterChef, wants to expand the pasty group’s menu and open more stores. ‘They got into a bit of trouble but it’s a fantastic brand and a great product. This is a great deal,’ he says.

Injuries meant former Liverpool striker Owen never quite fulfilled his promise on the pitch. Not so off. After kicking his last ball for Stoke City, his fifth top-level club, last year, aged 33, he became a TV commentator with BT Sport, earning £1m a year, and he now runs Michael Owen Management for young footballers. He has also turned his hobby, horse racing, into a business. He bought his first horse at 18 and now has his own racing stables in Cheshire, with 90 horses under trainer Tom Dascombe. He has owned and bred a winner at Royal Ascot. He is careful, he says, to treat the horses as a business and not use the sport to replace the adrenaline rush that footballers lose when they quit playing. ‘I don’t get caught up in the hype. That way I’ve got a better chance of leading a normal life.’

Owen’s former Liverpool team-mate Robbie Fowler, who scored more than 100 goals for the club in the 1990s and early 2000s and retired from football in 2012, has become a property magnate. His bricks’n’mortar empire is worth more than £31m. He began by buying rows of cheap terraced housing in Oldham, before moving into the luxury markets in Manchester and London. ‘When I first started I didn’t know much about the property world but I had some good advice from people who did,’ Fowler says. ‘It doesn’t matter what state the market is in, there’s always money to be made as long as you get the right education.’

He now runs the Property Academy, which ‘teaches you how to make money’. ‘A university education will cost £45,000 these days and it doesn’t teach you how to make money,’ says Liam Gilmore, a fellow property investor and the 2013 keynote speaker at the Academy’s introductory workshops. ‘The three-day session is £997, and it does.’

Other football real estate moguls include Ramon Vega, Tottenham Hotspur’s Swiss former centre-half, who in 2006 founded Matterhorn Capital Rosalp, which develops luxury hotels. One of his first projects was in Verbier, the ski resort, where his subterranean private members’ club Coco boasts wall-to-wall gold-leaf décor and Swarovski crystal-topped cocktails at a cool £4,300 a pop.

In a sport where a single GCSE earns you the title ‘the professor’, Lampard is something of an academic. He signed a book deal with publisher Little, Brown to produce stories aimed at children aged five and over, having come up with the Frankie’s Magic Football series when he began reading stories to his two daughters. However, poor Frank has not displayed the same consistent talent with a pen as he does from the penalty spot: book number six, Frankie and the World Cup Carnival, was published on 1 May, and is currently languishing at 2,283 on the Amazon bestsellers list.

His property empire is doing rather better. His portfolio is worth an estimated £23m, including mansions in Chelsea and Surrey worth £13.5m and a number of Docklands apartments. In March 2012, Lampard put Yaffingales, a six-bedroom Tudor-style mansion in Surrey, on the market for £7m (he bought it for £4m in 2004). Like his uncle Harry Redknapp before him, the England midfielder has proved an effective wheeler-dealer.