Eddie Hapgood captained Arsenal and England, managed Blackburn, Watford and Bath City, and finished his working life running hostels in Harwell and Weymouth. When money got tight he wrote to Highbury asking for help and the club sent him £30. Cliff Bastin went home to Exeter and kept a pub. Joe Mercer broke his leg at Highbury in April 1954 and ran a grocery business in Wallasey before going into management at Sheffield United, having twice turned Arsenal down. Life after Arsenal has always been a question. What has changed is how many answers there are.

Familiar routes beyond the pitch

The traditional exits are still the busiest. Mikel Arteta spent three and a half years on Manchester City’s bench and came back as manager; he signed a new contract to June 2030 on 7 October, with Arsenal the reigning champions. Per Mertesacker was handed the academy before his playing contract ran out, with no coaching record at all, and ran it for eight years before accepting the DFB’s sporting director role from 1 January 2027. Jack Wilshere took Arsenal’s under-18s to the FA Youth Cup final in 2023, served as interim manager at Norwich, and in October 2025 got his first full-time job at Luton Town.

Thierry Henry has done both halves, joining CBS Sports as a studio analyst for its Champions League coverage in September 2021 while still an assistant with Belgium, then three years later taking France’s Olympic side to a silver medal in Paris before stepping down. Patrick Vieira has managed Nice, New York City, Crystal Palace, Strasbourg and Genoa, which sacked him in November 2025.

The less visible version is the one this blog wrote about in 2019, in a piece on where players go after leaving Arsenal: Paul Davis coaching coaches at the FA, Eddie McGoldrick running Crystal Palace’s academy, Andy Linighan owning a plumbing firm. The Professional Footballers’ Association now runs a business school whose course list includes an MSc in football club management and a workshop simply called The Career Transition Programme, and a 2018 survey of 800 former professional sportsmen, run by the players’ unions in football, rugby and cricket together, found that 90 per cent needed to work full time after they stopped and only 29 per cent had chosen when to stop.

When a public profile opens unexpected doors

Mathieu Flamini co-founded a biochemicals company that holds patents on producing levulinic acid, a molecule the US Department of Energy has listed among a dozen that could replace oil-derived ingredients. Héctor Bellerín bought into Forest Green Rovers in September 2020, becoming the club’s second-largest shareholder while still under contract at Arsenal, because, as he put it, “it’s important that I invest in things I am passionate about”. Nwankwo Kanu’s heart foundation says it has funded over 700 operations since 2000.

Celebrity involvement in the casino industry

The casino business is one of the places a former player’s name turns up, and the newspapers tend to use one word for what are really four separate things. A player can own a stake in a gambling company, be paid to promote one, license his face to a game, or simply gamble. The first three are commercial contracts and the subject of what follows. The fourth is a private matter, and no Arsenal player, past or present, is being discussed in that sense here.

Footballers as investors

The investor route has a cautionary case attached to it, and it belongs to a player who never wore red and white. Zlatan Ibrahimović held roughly a tenth of a Malta-based betting company through his own holding firm while still playing for Milan, and UEFA’s rules forbid players from having a financial interest in a betting business. In May 2021 its Appeals Body fined him €50,000, ordered him to end the association and fined his club €25,000 for good measure; the stake was reported sold around the same time. For a player still registered, in other words, the door is shut, and the governing bodies check.

Celebrities as game characters

The licensing route is quieter and a good deal more common. Paulo Futre, the former Atlético Madrid and Portugal winger, lent his image and recorded voice to a slot game released in August 2021, set in ancient Rome and built by a Spanish studio that attaches a different local celebrity to each market it sells into. Futre’s face is the game’s wild symbol. His involvement ends at the licence; he has no part in the business behind it.

Futre licensed his image and voice, not a stake in the company behind the game. That distinction matters in an industry where modern slot games can use a recognisable personality as part of their theme, giving players a familiar face alongside the game’s own mechanics. The same principle applies to football video games, where Henry, Bergkamp, Vieira and Pires appear as EA “Icons” under separate licensing arrangements. In each case, the player’s image becomes part of a product without making them responsible for running it.

Could former Arsenal players explore similar opportunities?

Some already have, in the broadcasting and video-game sense, and the pattern in the names above is that the second career usually started during the first: Mertesacker, Bellerín and Henry were all at it before the boots came off. What a player does on his days off at Colney is a fair guide to what he will be doing in ten years.

A career beyond the Emirates

Hapgood’s £30 is the number that stays with me. The club he captained could spare him that much and no more, and the structures that might have helped him did not exist. The 2018 survey says the problem has not gone away. The exits have multiplied, though, and a few of the new ones exist only because a player’s face is worth money to someone.