Imagine you’ve been picked up by a top-tier football academy at the age of 10. You progress well in pursuing your dream to play football, and at 18 you’ve been selected as part of the first team squad to travel to Old Trafford. What you’ve worked so hard to achieve in your teenage years appears within grasp… but it slips.
This is what happened to Toby Bull, who was released from Brighton academy in the summer of 2023, just over a year after travelling to Old Trafford.
He spent his next year on varied ventures. Eastbourne Town, Carshalton Athletic, Aveley FC, Burgess Hill, Wealdstone, Worthing. All in the 2023/24 season.
“It was my first season out of professional football and I had a really tough time with injuries and moving from club-to-club. Especially as a goalkeeper, most clubs already have their goalkeeper set in stone.”
Some spells at these clubs lasted less than a month. Bull tells me: “A club says, ‘can you come and play this game for us?’, and I thought, this is a good opportunity. But actually their goalkeeper is just injured for one game, so all of a sudden I’m moving elsewhere.
“I spoke to my parents about that and they just wanted to see me happy and enjoying football. I wanted my dad to be able to come and watch me play football, and my uncles and my friends. Because last year, argh…”
He winces, retelling his memories.
Embed from Getty ImagesBull’s experience at Wealdstone encapsulated his frustrating season. He signed for the National League side on February 10, 2024, following the arrival of new manager David Noble. However, Bull left only 30 days later, without starting a single game.
“I was signed straight away and I thought it was a really good opportunity,” he said. “But the goalkeeper was doing well and the manager didn’t drop him.
“I gave it a go and it didn’t work. Sometimes it happens.”
After his release from Brighton and the subsequent year, it would have been easy for Bull to give up with football and mentally spiral. Multiple studies (Brown and Bortrac, 2009, for example) have revealed the mental health effects of being released by academies, including clinical levels of psychological distress which can worsen with time and a loss of identity.
Bull recognizes he is fortunate to have a strong support system around him, naming friends and family that helped him navigate this difficult period: “I’ll admit, when I was at Brighton, I kept a lot of things to myself and wouldn’t really speak to many people, even my parents. But I think now, maybe it’s just maturity, but I’ve opened up a bit more and I feel a bit more comfortable.
“I want to be able to support people with this issue because I don’t think enough boys speak about it, but I don’t know if I’m in a position right now to do that. I probably still need a bit more emotional intelligence myself before I start giving advice to people. I can only give my experiences and everyone’s experiences are so different.”
Bull has always been eager to learn. During his final year at Brighton, he completed a master’s degree in football business management from the Sports Business Institute, Barcelona. He calls this experience one of his best in life so far.
“Every week we have lessons and we had people coming in such as the head of marketing at Bayern Munich… the contacts I made from it were incredible. I was the youngest person to ever do that course, so for me it was pretty special. None of them looked at me at asked ‘what are you doing here’ or judged me for being young, so the people on the course were just fantastic.”
Bull has also passed his UEFA B Licence in coaching and participated in the Premier League Futures Programme, which Brighton put him forward for after leaving the academy. He marvels over speaking with the Head of Creative Strategy at Google, and the knowledge and friends which came out of it.
He’s very savvy, and keeps his options open: “I think I’m quite a busy person and I try to keep myself busy. I couldn’t sit indoors every day and do nothing.
“Of course I want to be a professional footballer, but there might be a time – I hope there isn’t – but there might be a time where I say I’ve given that a good crack, but now I’ve kept my options elsewhere. I think it’s important to have different options, especially nowadays the way football is.”
His social media presence is another possible avenue. Since September 2023, Bull has been making goalkeeper content and has amassed over 135k Instagram followers.
“I’ve just hit over 15,000 new followers in the space of a month or so, which to me, thinking about it is crazy. I saw it from a football perspective – what stadiums am I filling up? My followers can now fill up Wembley!”
After a difficult last season, Bull has settled with Lewes. He calls the difference: “night and day,” and says: “I kind of feel at home with players, staff and the fans as well, who are so welcoming.
“I like the fact they have a lot of quirky things there, like you can bring your dog if you want to… It’s nice to be somewhere slightly different, a bit more open. I think I sort of needed that, especially after last season.”
Embed from Getty ImagesThe ‘family feel’, as he calls it, helped Bull to settle and enjoy his football again: “If I was just turning up and going home and not speaking to people, I probably wouldn’t have that same interaction.
“If you want that family feel, you’ve got to want to be part of the family – the family doesn’t work one way.”
Bull has experienced heartache since Old Trafford, but he has come a long way since. He is back to enjoying football with Lewes as he rebuilds his career in Sussex.
