Owning a pub, appearing on Sportscene or boozing in the Algarve are what some former footballers do to amuse themselves in their retirement years, when other professionals are just hitting their prime. One ex-footballer took a different route, picking up his quill when he hung up his boots.

The post-playing period can be lucrative and prominent if you slot into the Alan Hansen or Gary Lineker bracket, or just prominent if you fit into the Paul Gascoigne mold. Some remain within the footballing fraternity and become managers and coaches, whilst others invest in hands-off businesses and retire as successful publicans or property owners.  Some decamp to the ignominious semi-prostitution of the American ‘soccer’ scene, and if you have ploughed a successful footballing furrow, you can remain firmly in the public eye for years after the glory days have ended.

But what of the overwhelming majority who disappear from public view and spend the remainder of their lives in quiet anonymity, free from the baying crowds and weekly pressures of the pitch?  Spotted young by the scouts, footballers are rarely allowed an opportunity to live any kind of life before the game consumes them, and being spat back into hasty normality can be a damaging and distressing shock to the system, after an adolescence and early adulthood spent having even basic social needs mapped out and catered for on your behalf.  

For Grant Johnson though, the transition has been far smoother, and he has segued almost seamlessly into professional practice with Thorntons in Dundee, the home of his birth and beloved Dundee United, where he spent the majority of his footballing years at the top level of the Scottish game.  His career path appears to be unique in Scottish football, and rare in the world of football anywhere across the globe.  
 
“I was offered the chance to go to Dundee United, where I had been training since I was a kid. I always played football and loved it.  So I went for a year, but was offered a place at Birmingham University to study law,” he explains.

“After that year I had to decide if I was going to stay at University, or go off and play football.  I chose to go to University at that point, but within weeks realised I had made the wrong choice.  I lasted a term, but came back and started at United, where I remained for eight years.”

Whilst playing consumed the bulk of his time, he was forward thinking enough to plan ahead for the inevitable early retirement that all athletic sports bring, studying an arts degree part time which allowed him to complete his LLb in two years.

“Ten years down the line I needed it. In the final year I didn’t play at all through illness and injury. I came home at the end of my contract, and was at a crossroads. I had a wife and young family, about to start school. The fact that I had been out for a year took my confidence down a little bit.  I trained with Dundee Utd again with Paul Sturrock, who trained me as a youngster, but ultimately I wasn’t signed and was in a limbo situation, and wondered what should I do now?  So I went back to University and did my law degree aged 28.”

Now nestled comfortably in the professional environment, Johnson seems content and at ease, and whilst he hasn’t accumulated the riches of Croesus, neither has he had to struggle, as the invisible majority of ex-footballers do.

“At Dundee Utd there were a lot us, young boys and lots of good guys coming through, and you see how everyone pans out twenty years down the line.  Two or three have done brilliantly, made their living from football and won’t need to work again. Duncan Ferguson, Christian Dailly. The rest of us had varying careers in the game and are having to do different things.  

“In those eight years at Dundee United I was in contact with hundreds of players. Some will come out of school and be there for a year, and that will be them. There are a lot coming out of the game now, having to make hard decisions at 35 or 36, having not made enough at football, and what do you do?  A lot of them are unskilled and have no qualifications.  People do struggle.”

Adjusting from the life before law has been challenging, after experiencing the adulation and highs of a successful playing career both in Dundee and in the English game, with strong bonds and camaraderie amongst the team that hardly compares to legal chamber work.

“When I first went to England, I had two really good years down there, playing in the FA cup at Everton and Middlesborough, with all these big premier league crowds. Playing in that environment, we were top of that league with top of the table clashes with Sunderland, and the town is buzzing. That was a good period.

“The worst thing coming in was getting used to being in an office, from nine to five, sitting there at your desk. The bit I don’t like is the indoor element, most of the time.”

If football is still in his blood, there’s still time for Thorntons to enter a team for the Ellis Fairbank Firm Fives, Grant. Now that would be interesting.