‘My dreams disappeared in a single second’ - Stiliyan Petrov on fighting cancer, leadership and the next step

Stiliyan Petrov is not shielding. He wants to make that crystal clear. He’s already shielded once before and, thankfully, never has to again.

In March 2021 it will be nine years since Petrov was diagnosed with leukaemia. From 2012, he would spend the next five years building himself back up after first breaking himself down with 13 months of intense chemotherapy.

“I had to protect myself,” Petrov tells The Independent. “I had to make sure all the measurements and medicines are there for myself. But also, I had to shield from my kids, from my wife, from my mum and dad. I didn’t have an immune system. One virus or contact with bacteria and my life was at risk.”

Not only is Petrov now healthy, but he is cancer-free. Thus, during the coronavirus pandemic, he has not had to shut himself away.  His children, sent away to their grandparents during his most challenging period, are at home with him and his wife in their Birmingham home.

His immune system is “as everyone else’s”. He is fit and healthy, even training his kids at every opportunity to aid their quest to become footballers. To those lucky to know him, he remains as compassionate and erudite as he ever was. The travails of a debilitating illness might have robbed him of years, but certainly not of grace or his infectious positivity.

“For me, now, I can enjoy more because I can spend time with my family. I can be around people I love. In these difficult times, I have my people around me. I didn’t before.”

It was during his most challenging period those years ago that a seed of an idea was planted in Petrov’s mind. It manifested as an identity crisis at first.

He was a footballer. A talented one at that: legendary status achieved at Celtic, Aston Villa and Bulgaria with the kind of dynamism that never goes out of style and lends itself to cult status. Yet, at 32, he was done, just like that. They say only the lucky athletes get to bow out on their own terms. Of the rest, few have less fortune than Petrov.

“It came from nowhere. My football, my dreams, all of it taken away from me. Everything I had planned for, everything that I thought would happen, everything that I wanted to achieve disappeared in a single second.

“I had to put everything on the side. And what I had to do was battle for my life. My battle was to survive. A battle to still be a human being, still be a father, still be a husband, still be somebody who wants to achieve more after the football. But I could not.”

As recovery got to a state where Petrov could return to the public eye, things got harder in a different way. He was alive, which was the positive above all positives. But he noticed little things: comments about his weight, the assumption everything was rosy at home. And how, whether he wanted to or not, he would be linked with cancer forever.

“It does not matter what you achieve as a player. People just knew me through my illness. It was difficult to accept," he admits. "But what I did not realise at the time was that, well, everyone gets forgotten.

“We think because we get paid every week and we get money coming in, everything is fine. But when we retire when we’re 35 or 36, we forget we’ve got another 35, 40 years go to maintain our standard of life. When we lose our purpose as footballers, we have to find another one. And finding that one can take a long, long time.”

Petrov tried to cling on, even trying to regain a deal at Aston Villa while also working at the club as a coach in two different stints, first in youth development and then part of Tim Sherwood’s first-team staff in 2015. A comeback was mooted in 2016, but, eventually, Petrov accepted he was done.

What followed was a period all footballers endure. Petrov tried punditry but found that world too fickle. He did his coaching badges but wasn’t sure he wanted to do that full-time because it felt like he was trying to chase that playing feeling: “You are around pitches, around players, in stadiums, involved in-game. It’s the closest you come to still being a part of that.”

Then, three years ago, while studying on Uefa’s masters of international players (MIP) course, he happened upon an idea in discussion with former professionals Emile Heskey, Gaizka Mendieta, Michael Johnson and Gareth Farrelly. One key question grabbed their focus: why had it taken them, international and top-flight footballers to a man, so long to work out what they wanted to be after their careers?

So, they came together to provide a solution in the form of Player4Player, a collective that aims to work with current and former players to ease the transition into retirement. Drawing on their personal experiences, their aims are straightforward: to offer guidance on the most uncertain part of being a footballer.

Player4Player have discovered that of those with Premier League experience, 40 per cent face bankruptcy within three years of retirement. Other aspects like the breakdown of marriages are more likely, while mental health struggles are exacerbated by these issues around family and finance.

It feels like there has never been a greater need for a more holistic approach to player advisory. Uncertainty in football is at an all-time high, while the game’s greed has never been more callous.

Proposals like Project Big Picture and the European Premier League, driven by billionaire owners, deign to make the rich richer. The Premier League themselves are further raiding fans with pay-per-view matches, while clubs themselves are making cuts at the bottom and stock-piling talent at the top. Players are slowly wising up to the fact that they are mere pawns in all this. That, says Petrov, needs to change.

“We always talk about football bringing people together,” he says. “Now you realise more and more that football is not bringing people together, it’s separating them. They are dividing people.

“Football should be united. We should work together. Look at Project Big Picture, look at the new European League they are talking about - you can see the power dynamics that exist and who has that power. People want to rule, they don’t want to work together.

“They don’t want to create an industry where we all become powerful. Which is sad to see. We do believe there is a lot of gaps in the system.”

Perhaps the most impressive detail in Petrov’s vision is what he refers to as “sustainability”. That football has become less about “playing”, he feels, is down to most ex-pros moving into coaching or the media, rather than aiming higher for executive roles, or looking to carry the game forward in more politically skewed roles.

“Not many players challenge themselves,” he says. “Because we are almost told not to. We are told what we want to hear. But how powerful would we become if we had people giving us honest answers?

“I’ve seen people come to me who are only interested in the money. I’ve seen different agents and been disappointed with probably 80 percent of them.

“Did anybody suggest for me to prepare for anything after football? A lot of talks but not much action. I had to do a lot on my own and I found that out very quickly. It’s not nice to say, but you learn from the mistakes of others. Because for them, those players struggling, they tried too late.”

Petrov, for now, has found peace. The wholesomeness to his midfield work, however daring or gritty, underpinned by a role as facilitator, is noticeable in the desire to lead others to their own peace.

“When you have your challenges as a person, you become wiser. You begin to see life from a different perspective. It’s like a puzzle, you put it together and hope you find the right answers.

“When you play you have an identity. When you retire, you need to create a completely different identity of what you want to be, who you want to be. You’re not the player anymore.

“I’m not *that* Stiliyan Petrov anymore. I’m the Stiliyan Petrov of what I want to achieve and be. I have to create my own life. Now that is by helping other people learn from my experiences.”

It is easy to say the world could do with more Stiliyan Petrovs. But football can consider itself lucky to have both of them.

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