The days of retired footballers waiting by the phone for a call from Sky Sports or the BBC are rapidly coming to an end, as a new generation rethinks their future.
The audience in football no longer belongs to broadcasters in the way it once did, and the players who understand this early hold a significant advantage over those who do not.
Many players spend twenty years preparing for their debut and, as Calum Hopkins observes, just twenty minutes preparing for their retirement from the game.
At 33 or 36, with boots hanging in the garage, many former players quickly discover far fewer people are sending messages than there were just six months before.
The Professional Footballers’ Association has repeatedly highlighted the mental health challenges that follow retirement, with loss of identity sitting at the heart of the problem for many.
Going from 50,000 people singing your name every Saturday to arguing with Dave in Tesco over the last packet of Hobnobs is not the easiest transition any person could face.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the route after football was straightforward: retire and hope the BBC, ITV, Sky, or a newspaper decided you had something interesting to say.
Today, a player like Rio Ferdinand has built enough of his own audience and media interests that traditional broadcasting is no longer a necessity in the way it was for previous generations.
Peter Crouch offers a comparable example, with his podcast succeeding not simply because of his playing career, but because of his entertaining personality and the audience he built alongside Chris Stark.
The podcast has racked up millions of downloads, and listeners return not for tactical analysis of a cold Tuesday night in Stoke, but because they genuinely enjoy spending time with him.
Ben Foster identified the same opportunity while still playing, attaching a GoPro behind the goal and growing his The Cycling GK YouTube channel to well over a million subscribers.
What made Foster’s approach particularly striking was that his audience included younger viewers who, in some cases, barely knew him as a footballer at all.
At certain points, Foster was generating levels of engagement that many football clubs themselves could never achieve through their own digital channels.
Hopkins identifies several practical routes available to players looking to build lasting relevance: launching a podcast, creating a YouTube channel, investing in a media business, or building a community around interests entirely separate from football.
The core problem, Hopkins argues, is that many players still see media as something that happens after football rather than as something to be built alongside a playing career.
Most of the advisers surrounding players grew up in an earlier era and do not fully understand the scale of the opportunity sitting directly in front of their clients today.
In ten years, the most prominent football media personality will likely not be the sharpest pundit in a television studio, but the player who recognised the audience early enough to claim it.
Football spends twenty years teaching players how to build a career and almost no time teaching them how to navigate life when that career comes to an end.
Hopkins argues that somewhere among the players currently competing at this World Cup, at least one is already laying the groundwork for the biggest post-football media career yet seen.
The shift in power from broadcasters to players is already well underway, and the footballers who act on that reality now will be the ones who remain relevant long after the final whistle.