Football players who have switched to poker

Over the years poker has witnessed a major boom in the number of people playing the sport across the world, to the extent that there have been calls to even include the sport in the Olympic Games.

Raising the status of the game to an Olympic sport will make it even more appealing to a group that has shown considerable interest in it already - professional footballers. This does not come as a huge surprise considering that betting is a huge part of the world of football, especially due to the easy availability of betting tips on internet platforms such as SBAT [3]. Here we’ve compiled a list of the most high-profile players to have made a name for themselves in the realm of competitive poker.

Tony Cascarino

After Tony Cascarino finished with his career after playing for teams such as Millwall, Chelsea and Marseille, he decided to merge his new role as a media pundit, with a life of semi-professional poker. The game appears to come rather naturally to Cascarino, who has raked up tournament winnings amounting to around $500,000, including the massive sum of £170,000 that he won in the GUKPT Grand final in 2009. While he has been able to maintain a pretty fair balance between his sporting and gambling life, other players have not been as successful in doing so [4].

Teddy Sheringham

A former teammate of Cascarino, Sheringham also decided to hang up his boots and plunge into the world of poker. In the course of his career he exhibited the same penchant for the card game as he did for football, with more than $329,000 in total tournament earnings. Further, Sheringham is a regular feature in the World Series of Poker Main event that is held in Las Vegas, where he had his best finish in 2009, coming in at the 14th spot and taking home over $70,000 in winnings.

Jan Molby

Following a successful career as a crucial addition to Liverpool’s defence in the 1990s and appearing over 40 times for his home country [5], Denmark, Molby decided to quit the game and followed the well-travelled route of management. During his managerial stints at Hull City, Swansea and Kidderminster, Molby supplemented his income by participating in poker tournaments. While he was not as successful on the poker table as Sheringham or Cascarino, he managed to take home a respectable $10,000 during his stint with the game.

Jan Vang Sorensen

Coming in after Jan Molby is Jan Vang Sorenen, the former Odense player whose career was tragically cut short after an ankle injury. While the other Jan on our list was not quite successful when it came to gambling, Van Sorensen managed to rake up over $2,000,000 in winnings since his retirement from professional football. Like many other football players, he managed to hone his skills at poker while travelling with his teammates for ‘away’ matches. On the whole, whether they are drawn by the allure of competition, or the huge sums of money involved in poker, football players have always been an integral part of the game.