An unexpected injury brought Jérémy Mathieu’s professional football career to an end earlier than he had planned. After years of organising his life around training, matches and teammates, he struggled to find a new routine. “I suffered from depression; there’s no point hiding it,” he acknowledges in an interview with ‘So Foot’. Support from his family and a job in a sports shop helped him reconnect with other people. There, he found something he had missed: “At Intersport, I rediscovered that dressing-room atmosphere.”
His career had taken him through FC Sochaux-Montbéliard, Toulouse FC, Valencia CF, FC Barcelona and Sporting Clube de Portugal, as well as the France national team. With Barça, he won the 2015 Champions League, two Spanish league titles and three Copa del Rey trophies, among other honours. Yet when he stopped competing, those achievements offered no answer to how he wanted to live the next stage of his life. He had imagined spending more time with his loved ones, but the transition proved far more difficult.
A retirement he had no time to prepare for
In 2020, he suffered a torn cruciate ligament while playing for Sporting. He was 36 and had imagined a different ending to his career: “I thought I would play for another two years, so mentally, I struggled to accept the situation.” The injury brought forward a decision he had not prepared for. He missed the pitch, the dressing room and the daily companionship that had shaped his life for so long. As he recovered with his knee in a brace, he entered a period he describes as a downward spiral.
“I stayed at home 24 hours a day. I went out occasionally, but never for long. I stayed on the sofa, in front of the television, with my phone,” he recalls. He even lost interest in watching football, changing channels if a match bored him. “I went round in circles: I would get up from the sofa, walk around the house and sigh.” His wife and children supported him, although they also felt the effects. “Fortunately, my wife was there to help me through it. I no longer knew what to do. I was completely lost.”
A former teammate and a job opening
The opportunity to change that routine came through Loïc Loval-Landré, a former teammate from his youth development days at Sochaux. Mathieu had previously explained on beIN Sports’ ‘Safe Play’ that Loval-Landré knew he wanted to get out of the house and told him about a vacancy at Intersport in Plan de Campagne, near Marseille. The store manager later defended the appointment to ‘20 Minutes’: he had received Mathieu’s CV through an intermediary and valued his skills and willingness to work. The newspaper’s reporter found him personalising a child’s Olympique de Marseille shirt.
“This job helped me regain my strength, rebuild my social life and, ultimately, feel alive again,” Mathieu explains. There were conversations with colleagues, jokes and customers who stopped to chat. Staff would switch channels on their walkie-talkies to talk without managers overhearing, and sometimes played football in the stockroom, even though it was forbidden. One day, the manager caught them. Mathieu also remembers a colleague who made everyone laugh: small moments of camaraderie that brought companionship back into his working days.
Finding space at home, too
The new routine also affected his marriage. His wife had taken on some work herself, giving them both activities of their own after spending so much time together at home. “Before that, we were together all the time, and it was becoming increasingly difficult. Working separately did us both good,” he says. Mathieu also started seeing friends again. The family that had supported him through his most difficult period could now share a different daily life, with activities and relationships beyond the home.
When a photograph of him wearing Intersport clothing circulated in April 2025, many interpreted the job as a sign that he had lost his money. Some customers also asked intrusive questions. “They don’t know my life or what I’ve been through. They only see the money, never the human side,” he says. He explains his decision in terms of a different need: “I’m not destitute. I just needed to regain a social life to get back on my feet.” The image showed a former European champion working as a sales assistant; his account explains what that work meant to him.
Returning to football in a different role
His search for a new direction included an approach to Sporting in 2025. According to his account in ‘So Foot’, he requested psychological support and backing for an academy in France linked to the club. He says he travelled to Lisbon, held a meeting and, after attending a match, waited 45 minutes in the tunnel without securing the meeting he wanted with the president. The project did not go ahead. Reporting on the episode, ‘A Bola’ maintains that the request concerned a €300,000 contribution towards the academy and did not include psychological support.
He now coaches the under-15s at AS Aix-en-Provence while studying for his coaching qualification, with the aim of working in a youth academy. He alternates three weeks at the club with one week of coursework. When discussing young players, he remembers Jean Fernandez, who supported him as he was starting out at Sochaux and advised him to stay when the possibility of joining AC Milan arose at 16. That personal attention continues to shape his approach: he wants to support his players as his former coach supported him.
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