Unless you have been living in a cave for the last few decades you will be familiar with the stereotype of uneducated footballers.
If reports are to be believed then the young men currently earning thousands every week are possibly not smarter than the average.
However, there are footballers out there who are at pains to show that a University degree does not mean the end of your professional career.
Exodus Geohaghon is one of those players. The 25 year old Peterborough United defender, who has a degree in film and video editing from the University of Wolverhampton, was at Bramall Lane for the opening of this year’s BUCS Championships and was keen to show that football and education were not mutually exclusive.
“There are a lot of stereotypes saying footballers are dumb and they don’t have the capacity to learn but that is far from the truth because in football you have to take in a lot of information and you have to be alert to a lot of different things.
Despite this Exodus realises that he goes against the public perception of footballers.
“There are a lot of people who are fairly surprised that I’ve been to university and at how far I’ve come. For a lot of people it is a shock and they probably look at me and think, no, he’s lying.”
At a time where many footballers are being chastised for not realising that there is life outside of the game and that football isn’t everything, Exodus is a breath of fresh air.
“The degree is definitely there for when I finish. Football doesn’t last forever and there needs to be something there when you it’s over, because that could be tomorrow.
“To be fair there are guys in the game who do think about other stuff, I know a few who want to be teachers and stuff so I am not the only one.”
Often society fails to see intelligence and a good education in the positive light that it deserves and this has always been the case in football with incidents like Graeme Le Saux’s bullying at Southampton for reading a broadsheet newspaper.
Exodus takes a different point of view.
“It is not a bad thing to be smart. It is not a bad thing to have an education. I don’t mind knowing that I have the paperwork to back me up when football’s finished.
“There are a lot though that don’t, and the media and the stereotypes that we have shows the naivety of the people involved rather than the stupidity that we are told it is.”
The Posh defender believes that the promotion of university sport is crucial to both the raising of footballer’s reputations and British sport in general.
“It needs to have much more of a role to be honest. Football clubs need to recognise that they can pick up good talent, capable of playing at a higher level, at Universities in this country.
“A lot of young people in football might not be good enough to make it and not wise enough to get an education and they fall out and end up doing nothing with their lives. It is a case of education stepping in and showing them that there is more to life and that they can make something of themselves.”
Let us hope that Exodus is the first of many more intelligent young footballers in this country, Heaven knows we need some.
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