'England icon gave me terrible advice but now I make £15k an hour in new career'

20 February 2024 , 05:00

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Paul McVeigh is now travelling the world to give speeches to corporate giants around performance psychology (Image: Paul McVeigh)

Paul McVeigh remembers sitting in the physio room as an apprentice at Tottenham’s training ground and Teddy Sheringham offering up one piece of advice.

“You’re a long time retired,” the England striker would tell youth-team hopefuls.

It was not just Sheringham, though. McVeigh heard similar from Gary Mabbutt, Darren Anderton and Nicky Barmby as he waited patiently for first-team stars to finish their treatment. “They would say things like, ‘Play as long as you can, wee man’ or ‘these are the best days of your life,’” McVeigh, 46, says.

And, in step with almost every young footballer, the Belfast boy - who would spend 14 years as a pro - initially considered that solid guidance.

Three decades on, however, McVeigh describes it as “terrible.” For the first Premier League footballer to obtain a Masters Degree in psychology, it encapsulated a mindset problem that still exists now.

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And when it comes to talking about mentality, there are few better equipped than McVeigh, who earns five-figures an hour to address leaders in the corporate world with keynote speeches about performance psychology.

“They were inferring the rest of my life was downhill,” McVeigh says. “I’m never going to be as happy, never going to make as much money, never going to be as successful.”

Instead he wakes up “feeling like the luckiest guy in the world” and is adamant his present life is more rewarding than scoring at a sold-out Old Trafford. “At 16 Alan Sugar started paying me some money to play football. I did that for nearly 20 years,” he says. “Now some other big organisations pay me money to talk about what I did on the pitch. I’ve done that for 15 years and it’s like, ‘Pinch me.’”

Paul McVeigh in action for Norwich

McVeigh began his senior football career at Tottenham before ending up at Norwich City (Paul McVeigh)

McVeigh has thrived when so many of his former team-mates have found retirement difficult and he recognises players require some duty of care to transition to the rest of their lives. But the suggestion that they should get assistance not available to those in other walks of life is not one that sits easy.

“I’m empathetic,” he says. “But why are we special? We’re not. We might be good at football but why should we get special treatment?”

Still, McVeigh remains an outlier. He began planning for life after football in his early 20s. He enrolled in a business degree but dropped out because he was unable to focus on it while playing 40 times a season for Norwich City.

Approaching 30 he started studying sports science and branched out to psychology, eventually working for the Canaries and Crystal Palace. Yet the focus now is keynote speaking. Last year he launched a leadership programme that lists Harry Kane, Yaya Toure and Mo Farah among more than 50 potential speakers.

Former Tottenham striker Teddy Sheringham gave McVeigh "terrible" advice

When McVeigh addresses audiences, from the big banks to BT, the emphasis is on his footballing exploits but what it is really about is how to succeed in ruthless industries. The key rests in setting goals, because meeting achievable ones builds confidence, and learning how to overcome problems.

He explains: “What I talk about is how to get the most out of yourself, the criteria that allows you to do it, and it always comes back to mentality and psychology.”

McVeigh recently returned from sharing a stage in Las Vegas with titans of American football and has just spent a weekend speaking to high-powered individuals in the Middle East that he does not want to name. “If you could write your own job description, that would be it,” he says, circling back to the advice from Sheringham and company.

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Plus, the rush he gets before getting on stage is not that different to what he felt walking onto the pitch. “I still get a massive buzz from doing it,” he says. “It’s the best rush I’ve gotten in my entire professional life.”

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Alan Smith