David Hillier Interview: Life after football
David Hillier talks to us openly about his life after football, support from the game, and the realities of being a firefighter
He made 143 appearances for Arsenal, helping them win the First Division, the FA Cup and the League Cup; and then he walked away to become a firefighter. David Hillier’s career is extraordinary, to say the least.
Defensive midfielder David Hillier was a homegrown ace for the Gunners - he also starred for Portsmouth, Bristol Rovers and Barnet, making 260 career appearances.
After retiring from playing professional football in 2003, Hillier didn’t become a typical pundit or coach. Charlie Rowan of The Sporting Blog interviewed the former player and fireman, who is based in Bristol.
Hillier’s new career as a fireman threw him in at the deep end: he had to save a man running down the street who was on fire:
“On the second day on the job, I went to a house fire and a guy came out of the house running down the street and he was on fire. That was quite crazy. He set himself alight while he was on the bed and then decided to run out. So we had a house fire and a man on fire.”
This was one experience of many that Hillier encountered when fighting fires. But he knew how to acclimate himself to new experiences, as he did frequently as a player. It was Hillier’s experience at Arsenal that shaped him in many ways.
The Early Days at Arsenal
And he reflected on where that Arsenal experience started: “You're not seen as an ordinary footballer when you're young and, you know, you're being picked by pro-teams to go and train with them, so it was a highlight when I was first asked to go and train with Millwall and Charlton [Athletic] and then after that obviously Arsenal. Signing for Arsenal for my apprenticeship - leaving school, that was a big deal. You want to get a job and my first job, luckily, was to be a trainee footballer. It was a job that thousands of kids dreamt of, but I did something right.
“I had success straight away with the FA Youth Cup in the first two years which the club hadn’t won for around 18 years. We knew we had a good youth team: the likes of me, Kevin Campbell, Scott Marshall, Neil Heaney, all the other players went on to make decent football careers.”
“It was great getting my first pro contract as a first-team player. And then my career just continued to grow. I was lucky enough to be a part of league Winning, FA Cup and League Cup-winning sides as well as the European Cup winners cup. There were many successes at Arsenal. Every day is a highlight reel when you're at Arsenal, especially when you've been there as a youngster.”
David Hillier’s Professional Career
Hillier was never expecting a successful football career: “I never thought I would become a pro footballer, I had no idea. You see the kids today, they're playing in the academy and they're focused and they're doing all of their training and all of their proper football school work - doing their educational stuff regarding football.”
“We never did any of that. What I did was I played football and someone thought I was good. So my dad took me to train a couple of times a week, at a couple of clubs but I never planned it as a career.
I never focused on it, when I was at training, thinking I'm going to work hard today because I want a career in football.
I just loved football and did it to the best of my ability every time I played it. And then obviously at 16 things became a reality. So then you do start thinking of it as a career and a job. So that was a big moment.”
He reminisced about the moment he signed his first professional contract: “When I got my first contract it was crunch time, it's the time when a lot of players disappear from the game, that period when you come out of your apprenticeship or your scholarship, and you're 18 years old; you want to earn a living and I know good players who didn't get a contract at that point, you've only got five or six weeks before a new season starts. So you need to find a club by then.
And if you don't you could end up just going back into the mainstream work. From 16, I think I was fully focused on football being at least my job until I was about 30, 35 and I just worked hard at that and luckily I got through to sort of 33 and a half. So I did okay.”
What it takes to be a top pro
Being a football player is not all glamour, however. There were sacrifices that Hillier had to make: “The downsides of being a footballer?
Time at home with the family, you know at times like Christmas and when people are going out on Friday nights and maybe even Saturday nights, if your game is a Sunday, you have to sacrifice all of that, there is a sacrifice you make when you see your mates going out and partying and going on holiday when they want and you know doing young people things.
“You've got also hold back on that and the biggest downside was leaving Arsenal and realizing you're probably on your way down - you’ve hit your high and then, no disrespect to Portsmouth or Bristol Rovers, but every player, they have their peak and then they sort of fall away and it's just remembering that high point and wanting to be there.”
What type of player was David Hillier? Would he fit into the modern game?
Hillier spoke about how he felt the fans at Arsenal appreciated him and his role as a ball-winning midfielder: “I don't think I really thought about any sort of accolades from being an Arsenal player.
When I left, I’d had a decent career, but I played with fantastically unbelievable players. So I just counted myself lucky to have been involved with those sort of players. I was a grafter and I was a decent player, but I would never put myself in a legend bracket. I mean if I was a legend then, what would Tony Adams be?
“You've got to put it in the right scale. I was fortunate enough to be part of some really good sides and I was a decent player and I actually find out now when I go back, 20 years later, I’m much more respected for the role I played because it was a very similar role to how the defensive midfielders play now, no one complains when Granit Xhaka doesn't score for 60 games as long as he does a good defensive-midfield job. No one complains that Mohamed Elneny has only scored one goal or if Matteo Guendouzi scored one.
“No one complains about that now, but back in the day, the defensive midfielder was kinda’ just a quiet player in the team that just got on with their job, but now they’re really important. So when people talk to me now, they say, ‘I wish you were playing there, we need a good defensive-midfielder. I'll get a lot more respect now for the role I played because it's more appreciated.”
Leaving Football behind and being left behind by Football
Hillier also looked back to when he decided to leave football: “When I retired, I was nearly 34. I had a couple of offers from clubs, but I didn't really want to travel and, again, I had young children and it was a time to just decide to say, ‘I'm not gonna chase the game anymore’.
I didn't really have any interest in being a coach at that time. And I wanted a little break, a couple of years being at home, being a family man, and I made a decent enough living so I could do that. So that was the decision, really, I just called it a day and said, ‘thank you very much football that was a good 20 years’.
“I probably was partly bored with football at the time. Honestly, it’s that you're bored of chasing the dream; you're not a young kid at 16 or 17 and you've got the security so you don't have to chase the dream so much. So the motivation wasn't there to really to do that, which is fine. I had a decent career and I was happy and I was quite happy to step back.”
He said that he didn’t have support from people in the game when he retired: “When I left football I had absolutely no support at all - nothing. When you leave football, you have left football.
And that was it. We got a letter a few weeks later saying that when you're 35, you weren't registered with the football club and your pension is such and such, but there's no transitional help, no help finding other careers, at least there certainly wasn't at the time.
“There was no help for people to cope with the transition because as we know a lot of footballers have had problems, especially from that era because they weren't very well-managed with their money either.
So you go from five grand a week to nothing and you still got the big house and the cars and sort of within two years you notice it's diminishing and you can't replace it and it is difficult to get back into football. For some people, it's a difficult time.
“I definitely had barely any help, I actually had more help when I was receiving careers advice at school when I was 15 rather than what I got after leaving a career in football, and I didn’t get that help from the FA which is sad, but I know that they do help now, there's a department for that purpose to help the players make the transition and they start it early as well.
They're encouraging players to be involved with planning their post-career stuff, while they're still in their mid-20s. So I think I suspect that's good from the FA.”
Keeping ties with Arsenal
He did not lose ties to the club where he began his football career, however: “I still worked, ever since I left football from 35 up until the present day, for Arsenal doing their commentary. So I was doing a regular football thing every week. It was always doing a Friday night show, a review show for Arsenal.”
“And that's evolved into Arsenal Nation Live, and all different comms working with the Arsenal media team, which I still do today as I said, so I've always felt in my Arsenal family doing work, but I never really wanted to work outside of that too much. I've done a few things for Sky, bits and pieces for BBC and blah blah blah, but I didn't really want to go down that route because that involved the commitment of weekends and Christmas, and all of that and I've done enough of that. I just wanted to have some other nice family routine.”
He tells us how he feels about speaking at events and engagements: “It can be difficult, but I think once you get up there and it's just people asking questions about your football career. I think it’s just naturally just talking about your football career. It's not a big deal.
“When I've done actual events where it's you know, you've got to tell a few stories and do all that sort of stuff, then I'll get a bit nervous, but I think at the end of the day, I'm privileged to be in a position where I’m asked to stand up in front of people so I don't worry too much about it. I think it's part and parcel of being a footballer in a successful club; everybody has to do interviews, all the players from back in the day, and they're all good lads and they all enjoy it.”
Starting a new career
We asked Hillier how he became a firefighter: “Well, when I left I started working with a builder doing some building work, doing extensions and stuff on houses and kind of got into the property side of things, but I was still missing that sort of day-to-day team spirit at work. And I think me and my wife were coming back from shopping one day and a radio advert came on saying that the fire service were recruiting in my local area.
“So my wife said, ‘Oh that might suit you, it’s only four days a week - the shift pattern. So you’re in a group of lads and a couple of girls and there was like a team ethic and they do a lot of sport. So I just thought, ‘You know what? Yeah, it sounds all right, and I just went for it and I actually failed the interview, I got all the way through to final interview and failed and then then I think the competitive streak came out in me and I wasn't going to be beaten and I went back three more times and failed, but on the last time I passed so, I persevered and that was the start of the next 15 years of my story.”
Football & Firefighting, the similarities
He told us the comparisons he draws from being a footballer and a fireman: “There are many comparisons I draw between working as a player and a firefighter. Working together in a pressurized environment. You've got an end goal in every job you do so, you know, winning if you're playing a football match or rescuing someone if you're doing a rescue job - it's an instant sorta’ result, you know after an hour, you'll have a result.
“It's not like a job where you go to work for three weeks to get something processed or something, it's a fast-paced environment. And then you've got the team spirit, a part of it, and then I think the sport was a big similarity because you can you get an hour's gym every day when you're there and they had a football team and so I joined that. So it was just a bit of fun, really, and it's not a particularly hard job when you're not on a rescue or something. So there's a lot of downtime, and those are the comparisons that I draw from it.”
“I don't think I crave heroism because every time I've done anything I’ve just walked away and don't want to be recognized. I think really I'm happier in the background, just knowing that I've done a good job. Like when I was playing football I’d rather come off the pitch if I was a man of the match and just been given, you know, a bottle of champagne or whatever just in the dressing room rather than in front of the camera or anything like that. I've never been one to crowd the Limelight and that's alright and probably, when I think back on my football career that kind of held me back a little bit because I probably would criticize myself by saying that I’m not as ambitious as I could have been but that might be because I wasn't flamboyant like some footballers are and that's where they get their extra little bit from.”
Smells like team spirit
Hillier explains the comradeship as a firefighter: “It's okay. I mean, you're not going to like everybody you work with. When I was at football clubs, I didn't like every player I played with. I wasn't friends with everyone, me and Perry Groves, we hated each other, but when you're playing for a team, you've got a job to do so, it's the same in the fire service that this good camaraderie when you've got a job to do. But you’re still people and you still decide whether you like them or not.
“The work ethic is just as good as it was when I was in football teams, but other than that, we're just people, we all go home to our families. We don't live with the people we work with, which is good in some ways because some of the footballers were well, I can't even say the words, but some of the firemen are too. That's just the way it is with work.”
“As a fireman, I've been through rescues because I'm based in Bristol, at the Avon Gorge and done rope rescue because I was rope-rescue trained. So I've got people off the cliffs, dogs off the cliffs, dead bodies of the cliffs, major car accidents, all sorts of injuries from just a bruise, two fatalities, but the normal cat-up-a-tree movie cliche, the bird on the roof - all sorts of things and then you've got the other side where you've got the more caring jobs we do when we go into schools for giving advice to the young kids, you know, even smoke alarm advice because you know some of the parents in some of these socioeconomic areas, which is sort of not as well off as others.
“They don't look after themselves well, so it's the kids that look after the safety things. We used to get the kids to check the smoke alarms in houses because their parents probably wouldn't. So there’s a lot of good work in the community and stuff like that.”
Responsibilities
We asked the league winner, “Has there ever been a moment where you felt, ‘Well, this is too much to handle’ during a rescue?” He replied: “I was always pretty detached from some of the scarier stuff, you know the blood and when the people were hurt etc. So I found it easy to detach myself. I was job-focused, where you've got a certain amount of time to think and I don't think you can let that creep in certainly afterwards you think about some of them.
“But again, I've never really taken my work home when it came to that. Pretty similar to when I was a footballer. If we got beat five-nil, I wouldn't come home and be depressed or upset like some other players would be, obviously, I’ll be disappointed but I’d never let it affect anybody else. And same with the work I do at the fire service. Someone's got to do it. Sometimes it's not a nice job. But you know, it was just something that you've got to do and you've got to be professional.”
“I think I don't know if I've ever really thought being a footballer as well as being in the service as being a responsibility. I think you do your best, at times we have lost people, not through not trying hard enough, but just, sometimes if there is nothing you can do, especially in car accidents and stuff like that. They're very difficult because you're not in charge of what's already happened.
“You're only in charge of what you can do. I think it's really well managed and the procedures are very tight. So I think they give you your sorta’ safety net. Because you know you've done the right procedures, you've done the right things, you put the right safety measures in place. You know you've done what you can so I think the responsibility is negligible when it comes to that unless you took it upon yourself to sort of act out of procedures or rules and it went wrong then yes you would be very responsible. But other than that, I think it's a pretty tightly run ship.”
This is an original article by Charlie Rowan for The Sporting Blog.
