By Ben Smith Former professional footballer

I always wanted to leave football on my terms but in the end I suppose it was mutual.

After 17 years as a professional player with Arsenal, Reading, Yeovil, Hereford, Shrewsbury and Crawley, today is the first day of the rest of my life. Today I am starting work as a teacher.

It is actually the same school that I attended - I am teaching business and ICT at the Maltings Academy in Essex - so it's not completely alien territory, but it still means going from being a 33-year-old, respected member of a dressing room to being the equivalent of a 19-year-old starting a new job.

I have known this time was coming, of course, so over the past four or five years I have completed a business management degree and done my Uefa coaching badges. During the last year I've been going into a school on my day off on a voluntary basis and they have offered me a job.

The point that triggered all this for me was buying a house in my mid-20s because before that I would join a new team, go off in my car with a bag of clothes and rent a room off another player.

It was as simple as that.

But having a mortgage meant that if I left a club, I could not just go back to living in my dad's spare room and see what happened. I knew I needed to plan ahead.

I had not been involved in education since leaving school with no qualifications at 16 but I decided to start a flexible access course. There were 10 of us in the room and we were asked to write down an introductory paragraph about ourselves. I just spent 15 minutes staring into thin air.

1995 - Signs professional contract with Arsenal.

Continue reading here:
Ben Smith: My life after football