Is soccer a good career option?

Many soccer lovers have pictured themselves as professional soccer players at least once in their lives. At least I did. However, there are some people who are seriously considering soccer as a professional career. Is it a wise decision?

Soccer can be an excellent career option for you if you are determined to be a professional sports athlete. However, if soccer is just another career path that you are considering, then it might not be a good option to prioritize it over other career options.

With that said, if your question is ‘is soccer a good sports career option’, then the answer is definitely yes. But if the question is ‘is soccer a good career option’ Then the answer is that it might not be.

Why is soccer a good sports career option?

If you are comparing between sports career options, and you are wondering whether soccer is the one, then you can rest assured that soccer is one of the best sports career options you can ever consider.

Here’s a list of the average salaries from the major sports leagues around the world in 2019/20.

As you can tell from the graph, out of the top ten sports leagues ranked by average salaries in 2019/20, half of them are soccer leagues.

These leagues are the English Premier League(EPL) with an average annual salary of $3.97M, La Liga with an average annual salary of $2.55M, Serie A with an average annual salary of $2.23M, Bundesliga with an average annual salary of $1.98M and Ligue 1 with an average annual salary of $1.3M.

Even if you think it’s nearly impossible to join one of the top soccer leagues in the world, there are hundreds of other soccer leagues around the world that are a little bit easier to join and that pay enough for you to have a good life financially.

What are the odds of becoming a professional soccer player?

There are hundreds of millions of people who play soccer around the world.

For comparison, there are 586 players in the EPL during the time of this article. With that said, if every single person of the 240M people who play soccer wanted to play in the EPL, then the chance of being a professional English Premier League player is close to zero.

Even though there are tens of other great soccer leagues around the world, the chance of being a well paid professional soccer player aren’t high.

Thus, if your options aren’t limited to a sports related career, then you better play soccer as a hobby instead of pursue it as a professional career.

Is pursuing a soccer career a risky move?

Even though the chances of becoming a professional soccer player at one of the top soccer leagues around the world are very small, deciding that you want to take your chance isn’t risky at all.

But how?

Whether you’re going to be a professional soccer player or not is determined when you are very young. Most of the best professional soccer players around the world were discovered when they were less than 18 years old.

For example, Lionel Messi was discovered at the age of 12, Cristiano Ronaldo was signed by Manchester united when he was 16, and so on.

With that said, you’ll know whether you have a chance to become a professional soccer player or not during your high school and your college years.

The older you get without getting signed by a major soccer club, the less likely you’re going to make it as a professional soccer player.

Thus, you’ll realize at a young age that there’s no way you can be a professional soccer player if you didn’t make it.

Since most of the other career options that you might have in mind probably start when you’re older than 20 (once you get a college degree), it means that you didn’t risk anything when you decided to take your chance to try and become a professional soccer player.

However, if you’re older than 20, and you’re leaving everything behind and only focusing on becoming a professional soccer player, then you are indeed taking a huge risk in your career life and you seriously need to consider prioritizing other career options.