For a while, Billy Sharp’s pinned post on X was his riposte to the opposition supporter who sent him an AI-generated image of the striker in his Doncaster Rovers kit, hobbling about the pitch on a walking frame.
His most recent post is a clip from the press conference that fell in the week of his latest birthday, at which his manager said, “Welcome to my club — the forties.”
— billy sharp (@billysharp10) September 7, 2025
Such is life when you’re still playing professional football at the age of 40: still scoring, still training every day, still relishing the needle with rival fans, still living with so much energy that, Sharp tells The Athletic, he observed to his wife that “lately, I’ve been having the energy to go to play padel as a cool-down”.
In November last year, Sharp passed 700 appearances in the English Football League (EFL), the bulk of them coming in the Championship and League One, the second and third tiers of English football. Another measure of the length of Sharp’s career is that he features in the iconic Neil Warnock documentary, which charts the then-Sheffield United manager’s 2004-05 season and has recently found a new generation of viewers via TikTok. The fashion alone — baggy tracksuits, blond highlights — underscores the passage of more than two decades.
On Saturday, Brighton & Hove Albion’s James Milner, aged 40, surpassed Gareth Barry’s record for most Premier League appearances. This was two weeks after 41-year-old Lindsey Vonn, the American skier, crashed out of the Winter Olympics at which she was competing with a ruptured left anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee and after having replacement surgery on the other one, sparking widespread discussion about what it all means when someone with so little to prove — she had already retired from the sport once, in 2019 — insists on doing so anyway.
Vonn is an extreme example even by the standards of elite sportspeople. Her mental-health coach suggests her endeavour was in service of the extraordinary strength of the human spirit from a three-time Olympic champion athlete who does not experience pain the way most do. The most famous example, Cristiano Ronaldo, indicated in December that he would not retire until he scored his 1,000th career goal. He is contracted to Al Nassr in Saudi Arabia beyond his 42nd birthday but said in November that the 2026 World Cup will be his last international tournament.
Still, there are broader themes worth interrogating, beyond the perfect confluence of biological factors that no doubt underpin 20-year athletic careers. Where some are relieved to reach the end of their playing days, how do others find the energy to go back to the well, season after season?
“While my body feels good, my head’s always going to tell me I want to play football and my heart’s always going to tell me that I’ll never want to stop,” Sharp says.
He thinks of his former Sheffield United team-mate Chris Basham, who retired in August 2024 at age 36, having undergone five operations to repair the ankle he shattered in a Premier League game almost a full year earlier.
“It’s an injury affecting his lifestyle. He’s still not right,” Sharp says. “To be able to still play football on the weekend, that’s in the back of my mind. It’s a privilege to play football. I’ve had team-mates who have had the opportunity taken away from them. Sometimes, that’s the thing that says to me, ‘Don’t stop yet because you’re lucky to still play and you’re still capable of playing at a good level’.”
The perspectives of women footballers are often broader still, given the sport’s historic and current frailties. Fighting for the women’s game’s growth, though, brings additional emotional labour, and there is a psychological toll from always demanding more from indifferent stakeholders. “For people in my generation, who have seen so much growth and so much evolution, what is ingrained in us deeply is to make the game a better place,” says 39-year-old Jess Fishlock, Wales’ most-capped player with more than 165 appearances.
Fishlock was part of a cohort whose hopes of reaching the 2005 European Championship, to be held in England, were dashed when the Football Association of Wales declined to fund the female squad through its qualifiers, and can remember the days of combining a burgeoning playing career at Cardiff City with work for a telecoms company: “You basically knew that what you were doing was just for something so much bigger. That, mixed with how I love the game, is truly what ended up keeping you going. Now, it’s probably less about the evolution of the game because you’d like to think the younger generation understands that — we’re tired. But I still have the love of it to carry on, which is truly a gift.”
Fishlock, who retired from international football in November but is still playing for Seattle Reign of the NWSL, underlines the particular kind of resilience needed in women’s football to keep waging off-field battles for improved pay, treatment and conditions: “Facilities, medical, travel, things like that — it just took so long to get that stuff right that it felt like you were doing this all and people were expecting elite level while the working conditions were subpar. That was always like, ‘What’s the point of this?’.”
Over the past few years, Fishlock has been consciously trying to “pass that baton on” to a younger generation of players for both club and country, acting as “more of a mentor and helping people understand how to go into these meetings and how to have these conversations. Eventually, when the entirety of my generation goes, you have to be able to pass that skill set on”.
This was also a focus for the recently retired New Zealand and Angel City defender Ali Riley, 38, who found the final years of her career derailed by labral tears to the cartilage in both hip joints and nerve compression injuries caused in part by the injections she had taken to prolong her career.
With her on-field influence dwindling, Riley sought to “encourage players to understand their resources and the rights they have and who they can go to. Without dwelling on the past, it’s like the players who experienced what it was like before can still use our really tough times — not to tell this new generation how good they have it, but to make sure they understand how empowered they are”.
By the end of Riley’s career, some of her team-mates were 21 years younger than her. She was conscious of “creating an environment that can empower girls who are so different than you were at their age”.
More remarkable than Riley’s five World Cup campaigns is what she has lived through during her years playing in America with three different clubs: teams folding, the collapse of the Women’s Professional Soccer league that preceded the NWSL, and the NWSL abuse crisis. “The simple way to say it is, like, we’re crazy,” she says. “Elite athletes at this level, especially women, are so resilient. We’re unwilling to let these awful things stop us.
“There are people who understand that women’s sport is not a charity, that it is a good investment, that this is a smart thing to do and the right thing to do. We choose to see those people and those instances of light. Maybe the most protective and evolutionarily sound thing to do would be, like, ‘I should not keep going’. I think about all the sleepless nights and the stress and what I’ve done to my body — I’m still recovering from all of that, and it was so worth it to be part of this game and growing it.”
Riley pushed that body to its limits over her final few seasons. With the acceptance that she would never play again came the hope of being able to live without pain. She grieved her diminishing control over her body — “it is the death of the athlete you were, of the opportunities you had, of an entire identity” — and questioned her purpose — “you need a lot of people reminding you that you still have value, because you question it every day” — but ultimately the decision made itself.
“I talked to so many of my colleagues who have retired and many wish they stopped earlier because they are not able to have an active life without pain,” Riley says. “Whether I could play one season more, two seasons more — what life do I want to live in the next 30, hopefully 50 years? How can I do what I need to do to be able to jog, to bend down, to sleep at night?
“What I was going through to get out on the field every single day was not the life I wanted to live. I wasn’t able to really be my full self. I deserve to have a life where I can feel joy, and I can be a good wife and a good daughter and a good friend. All of my energy was being put into being able to warm up and to train with my team.”
Riley also found it hard to justify pushing through the pain barrier for limited returns while her desire to start a family was growing: she froze her eggs in 2020. “If I would want to try to push my body further, what am I then missing out on for continuing to do something that is hurting me every day?” she reflects.
Fishlock says she is still posting personal bests in fitness tests. In 2025, she became the oldest goalscorer in the history of the Women’s Euros finals. “For some reason, when you hit 30, everyone seems to think you can’t walk anymore,” Fishlock says. Other people’s reactions made her more conscious of her age than she ever was.
“If an older player has a bad game, it’s because they’re old and past it — it’s a myth, a naive way of thinking and perhaps a lazy way of thinking. I will be out here, y’know, dying on that hill and debunking that myth for the rest of my days.”
Sharp is not even the oldest player in the three divisions and 72 clubs of the EFL.
Goalkeeper Joe Murphy, 44, is into his third year as a coach-player at Tranmere Rovers, but an injury to their first-choice at his position has seen him play 21 times in League Two this season.
“I probably feel better than I did when I was a younger goalkeeper, physically and mentally,” Murphy says. “The more experienced you get… not the easier it is, but I could turn up and play a game at the drop of a hat. I can mentally get into that zone very easily. Then you’re more relaxed. My decision-making is better, which means maybe my reaction time is better. When you’re a young, inexperienced goalie, you probably need more preparation.”
Underpinning it all is self-confidence. “I just believe I can play at a high level,” Murphy explains. “I believe I can play for my country still (the most recent of his two appearances for the Republic of Ireland came in 2010). I believe I can play in the Premier League still (Murphy’s only two games at that level were for West Bromwich Albion in 2002). It’s not going to happen, but that’s the belief I have, and that’s the drive I have. If I felt I couldn’t contribute and my standards weren’t as high as the other players around me, I would gladly walk away.”
Sharp, for his part, still thinks he could play today for Sheffield United, where he made close to 300 appearances across English football’s top three divisions during a third spell at his boyhood club between 2015 and 2023.
It is another example of that belief, but Sharp’s story highlights how any long career involves overcoming anguish.
His plan had been to retire on his own terms at Sheffield United and, after leaving at the end of the 2022-23 season, he “had a think then about retiring because I didn’t think I could put another shirt on. The emotional side of things was the biggest thing. I was hurt badly.”
But life in MLS with LA Galaxy rekindled his passion and was “where the emotion side of things went away. I was watching the Premier League from afar, getting up at stupid o’clock to watch Sheffield United. It was a tough time, but it wasn’t in my face because I was in America playing. It’s probably the reason I’m still playing now.” He returned to England with Hull City in December 2023, and has been with Doncaster (it’s his third spell with them too) since the following summer.
Sharp is still a way off Peter Clarke’s haul of more than 1,000 career appearances — with game 1,000 notched up for Prescot Cables in the Northern Premier League Premier Division, the seventh tier of the English game, last October. Having played in the top four divisions from 1998 to 2023 for 11 different clubs after coming through the youth ranks at Everton, defender Clarke now works full-time but still trains two evenings a week.
The original plan had been for him to finish playing professionally at 41.
“My wife said to me, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to go cold turkey?’. And left me with that thought. She was right,” Clarke says. “Football was my drug of choice. I’ll go as far as to say that when I was a kid, I was addicted. My greatest love is my family, my first love is football. That’s probably what keeps me going back.”
Clarke reckons that he could “probably remember something” about each of those 1,000 games if he had a list in front of him, broken down into seasons. It seems remarkable he hasn’t yet got bored and has been able to go to the well more than 1,000 times.
“Motivation comes and goes, but discipline outlasts motivation,” he says. “Even when you don’t want to do the running session or get yourself in the gym, through the course of a career, it becomes a mindset. The motivation might ebb and flow, but if you can recall the things that serve you well, the discipline and doing those things help keep you out on the pitch.”
Much of the conversation around retirement focuses on the difficulty footballers face filling the void the game leaves when it’s gone — the laughter of a packed dressing room swapped for lonely rounds of golf and trying to recapture football’s unique highs. Murphy, logistically ready for retirement thanks to his coaching business, has a more comforting perspective.
“I am at peace, because I know I’ve been very lucky,” he says. “I’ve probably had three careers, really. Some (players) start at 15 and end at 20, 21, 22.”
Clarke, meanwhile, kept his celebrations after that 1,000th game typically low-key.
“I worked during the day, came home, got changed and then out to the game. Back home, ice bath and off to bed.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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