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Once you're a football player, you're a football player for life. You always think of yourself in terms of that. We all do. It's hard to get rid of when you can't play anymore.

It all went wrong with football, the thing I loved most of all, and from there, my life slowly fell apart.

A lot of people say you always come back to what you are good at. Football has been 25 years of my life, so maybe I'll come back to it in some sort of way.

I've been through a lot off the field. I think that kind of translates onto the field. Football serves for a lot of life lessons, and so it allows me to stay humble and continue to work.

But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens, that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important, but not as important as you once thought it was.

I stopped playing football because I'd done as much as I could. I needed something which was going to excite me as much as football had excited me.

Playing football was like being trapped in a rhythm, and my whole career was like that. You have very little time to switch off.

There's a window in my life which is football. I try to remember that it's not going to be there forever. That's why staying humble is important; knowing who I am and the message I'm sending out. I always try to be a person first, before I'm No. 55 on the football field.

From my point of view what I have to do now is appreciate and enjoy what football gave me, but now do something else with the same energy and enthusiasm I gave to football without expecting the same results.