From the Pitch to the Present: What I Learned When I Used to Play Football

The smell of freshly cut grass, the weight of the mud-caked boots, the specific ache in your legs after a full ninety minutes—these sensations are etched into my memory. My time on the football pitch, while it didn’t lead to a professional career, gifted me with a toolkit of lessons that I now apply daily, far from any goalpost. This journey, from the pitch to the present, is more than just nostalgia; it’s a living manual for tackling life’s challenges. The core principle I learned, and one I want to guide you through, is the discipline of sustained effort and the strategic use of motivation. It’s not about never resting, but about understanding the rhythm of hard work.

Let me walk you through the method, starting with the foundational mindset. In football, you have a clear season: pre-season, the competitive matches, and a brief off-period. Life, annoyingly, doesn’t come with such a neat schedule. It’s one continuous match. So, the first step is to create your own seasons. Break your big goals—whether it’s building a business, writing a book, or getting fit—into distinct phases. I treat my quarterly work objectives like a pre-season: it’s for intense learning, planning, and foundational training. Then, I launch into the “competitive” phase of execution. But here’s the critical part, stolen directly from my old coach’s playbook. He used to tell us, “Sabi ko nga sa mga players namin na sana, yun yung palaging gawin nilang motivation na one week lang kayong nagpahinga, ang laki ng sinacrifice niyo, tuloy-tuloy yung training at hard work niyo.” That translates to a powerful concept: let the brevity of your rest be your fuel. After a planned break—a real one, where you disconnect—you don’t slump into guilt. You use that memory of rest as a catalyst. You remind yourself, “I had my seven days. Now, for the next ninety-three, the effort is non-negotiable.” It frames discipline not as a punishment, but as the price paid for that precious recovery.

Now, for the daily training. On the pitch, we didn’t just show up and play a match every day. We drilled: passing patterns, set pieces, fitness circuits. The application here is in systemization. You can’t rely on motivation, which is as fickle as the weather on a match day. You build routines. For me, that means the first 90 minutes of my workday are sacred and structured—no emails, no social media. It’s my passing drill for deep work. I track my progress in a simple spreadsheet, much like we tracked our fitness stats. And here’s a personal preference: I’m a firm believer in the power of marginal gains. Improving by just 1% every day in your core skill might seem trivial, but that compounds to being nearly 38 times better in a year. I saw this in how a player’s first touch improved from season to season; it wasn’t overnight magic, but thousands of deliberate repetitions against a wall.

A major pitfall, both in sport and life, is mismanaging feedback. On the pitch, a missed tackle or a lost game stings immediately. The natural instinct is to get defensive or make excuses. The method that works is to separate the emotion from the analysis. After a project setback, I literally schedule a “post-match review.” I ask: What was the game plan? Where did the breakdown occur? What’s the one actionable thing to fix for next time? This isn’t about blame; it’s about pattern recognition. I learned more from the 3-0 loss where our midfield was overrun than from the easy 5-0 wins. In life, that “loss” might be a failed client pitch or a missed deadline. Treat it as data, not destiny.

Finally, we have to talk about the team, even if your work feels solitary. I was a midfielder, and my entire role was about connection—seeing spaces, anticipating runs, supporting both defense and attack. No goal was ever truly a solo effort. Translating this means actively building your support network. Who are your defenders, the people who have your back when you’re under pressure? Who are your strikers, the ones you can pass the ball to for them to finish a project? You have to be a reliable teammate to them as well. Share knowledge, make introductions, offer support. The synergy of a good team multiplies individual effort. I’ve found that collaborating with just two other dedicated people can increase our collective output by what feels like 40%, not just 20%, because of the ideas we bounce off each other.

Looking back, the transition from the pitch to the present wasn’t about leaving football behind. It was about decoding its principles for a different arena. The discipline of structured seasons, the use of strategic rest as a motivator, the commitment to daily drills over waiting for inspiration, the analytical processing of failure, and the indispensable value of your team—these are the transferable skills. Football taught me that success is a long campaign, not a single match. It’s about showing up for training even when you’re tired, trusting the process, and knowing that the sacrifice of continuous effort is what makes the eventual victory, or even just a well-played game, so profoundly satisfying. The final whistle on my playing days blew long ago, but the game, it turns out, never really ended.