Footballers tend to go into coaching or punditry after their playing days if they decide against a quieter retirement playing golf – but a smaller number have turned their hand to politics.
The two professions are – or at least should be – completely mutually exclusive, but footballers heading into politics has almost become weirdly common.
They’ve enjoyed… mixed… levels of success.
Romario
The 1994 World Cup winner was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in Brazil in 2010, became a senator in 2014 and in 2018 ran for the governor’s post in the state of Rio de Janeiro, finishing in fourth place.
To his credit, a lot of Romario’s work has been focused on corruption in football – with the former attacker very outspoken against the 2014 Brazil World Cup.
Pele
Not content with being a scout for Fulham, Pele has also served as Brazil’s extraordinary sports minister.
He even created the ‘Pele law’, which sought to reduce corruption in Brazilian football, but left the post in 2001 after being caught up in a corruption scandal himself. He has also worked for UNESCO and the UN since retiring.
READ: Trying to work out how and why Pele became a scout for Fulham
Sol Campbell
Amid his long search for a manager’s job, Campbell also made it quite clear that he is a member of the Conservative party.
He considered running for office in 2014, before throwing his name into the ring when the elections for the Mayor of London were being discussed – but he didn’t make the Tories’ shortlist.
Hakan Sukur
A quite remarkable tale has led the affectionately known ‘Bull of Bosphorus’ from becoming the all-time top scorer for both Galatasaray and Turkey to being exiled to the US, unable to return home.
Choosing to go into politics when his career came to an end, Sukur became an MP for the ruling party, sharing a close relationship with its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and cleric Fethullah Gulen – the trio were pictured together at Sukur’s first wedding.
Sukur chose to leave the party and remain an independent MP in 2013, as tensions grew between ‘Gulenists’, who wanted Turkey to become a more Islamic state, and Erdogan’s rule.
In 2016, Gulen was blamed for a failed coup and any supporter or person found to be connected to him was arrested, and Sukur fled to America.
He was also being charged with insulting the country’s president on Twitter, and for all his charges – which include being a suspected member of an armed terror…
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