Life After Football: Nedum Onuoha | OneFootball

As we build towards our new CITY+ documentary 'Life After Football', we focus on the five main protagonists featured in this must-watch City Studios masterpiece...

We move next to Nedum Onuoha, who was happy to hang his boots up, but wanted to continue his life in football in a different guise...

A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME: NEDUM ONUOHA

Some players leave their playing days behind but continue in the game they love.

Nedum Onuoha started at City aged 10 and would enjoy a 16-year career with the Club before moving on to QPR and finishing in the MLS with Real Salt Lake City.

He was 33 when he hung his boots up in 2020, but he was far from finished with football.

An academic flyer, talented musician and outstanding track and field prospect during his teenage years – he once clocked a time of 11.09 seconds in the 100 metres was, in his eyes, at the start of whole new world of opportunities.

A podcast and autobiography followed, but for this most eloquent for former players, the world of football punditry seemed not so much like a possibility, but a necessity.

“All you've ever been taught to do is to be a footballer,” says Nedum.

“How far does your identity get you, when the thing that you did for so long, isn’t a thing you can do anymore?

“I think for some, they love the game so much that they'll do anything they can to be part of it for as long as possible.

“All you've ever been taught to do is to be a footballer, to be part of a team, to be given your schedule, to be working on your fitness based around this.

"Having this goal, this objective... so many questions. But they're all related, and they all orbit around football.

“Your whole life is geared towards it. ‘No, you can't go out today because I've got a game tomorrow' or ‘I can't really go out the day after because I need to get ready for the next game in two days’ time.’

“But in retirement you don't have that anymore. And I think from an identity standpoint, a lot of people do suffer.

“How far does your identity get you, when the thing that you did for so long, isn’t a thing you can do anymore?”

With 427 professional games under his belt, Nedum had a hugely successful playing career.

But his life of today is with at odds with his early years when his family moved from Africa to the challenging streets of an early 1990s Moston.

“I came over when I was five or six, with my mum, my dad and at the time, two other sisters.,” he remembers.

“And we were very much the Nigerian family within Manchester.

“We did feel different because we were the only non-white family, essentially, in the area. So there were times when some people, maybe, they would treat you as such. Sometimes good, mostly bad.

“Myself and my younger sister, we'd always walk to school, walk back.

“But then one day we came, and the door was, like, slightly open. And then obviously we started hearing voices from people upstairs in the house, ransacking it.

“I panicked, and I ran out the house and my sister Chidi hid behind the sofa.

“And the two people ended up running out of the house because they heard that somebody was there.

“If they would have seen that, maybe it was a nine-year-old and a six-year-old, maybe things would’ve been different.

“There were other times where, we’d be burgled and we wouldn't walk in on it, and we’d been burgled by neighbours.

“It wasn’t necessarily the nicest introduction to life in Manchester at all.

“To start with, I didn't have huge aspirations about trying to play football or anything like that, whereas if I was where we lived back then today, you would be able to see the Etihad and it's an obvious dream, isn't it?”

Today, Nedum is a football pundit on various platforms and mediums, most notably as a regular on BBC Radio 5 Live where he’s proved a popular panellist and pundit.

“When you play, you’re perceived to be somebody who just wants to be there all the time, wants to be part of it, wants to be on the field, wants to be engaged in that sort of like, buzz and that rush of just, you know,  football culture,” he says.

“I look at the punditry career that I've had to date, and I get that rush with the work that I do.

“Getting the chance to talk about football, for me, is the second best thing, outside of playing it.

“The games I enjoy the most are the ones where it comes to the end of the season, Carabao Cup final, the FA Cup final,  the FA Cup semi-finals, the play-off final because that feeling of seeing fans arrive at Wembley, being in the stadium for objectively big games, is awesome.

“And when I get a chance to do that, you see a smile on my face and as a consequence, like, you know, I'm happy to be there.

“Of course there's some people who want to start the rest of their life as early as possible.

“But then you also see lots of times where people will keep going and keep going and keep going.

“Without a doubt, one of the best moments of my career, was that moment when I knew I wasn't going to play again.

“I knew that everything that I'd done beforehand meant that people appreciated everything that made me who I was, and the sort of legacy that I leave with the players who I played with.

“There are many different ways in which you transition out of football, but I think for some, you know, they love the game so much that they'll do anything they can to be part of it for as long as possible.

"While I completely understand that, I was ready to move on."

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