Steer reflects on the nature of retirement from football and ending a career with 'no regrets.
Header image: via Shutterstock
Those of us who spend our lives around football but not inside it can develop a keen sense of its internal norms as we see them.
Players should conduct themselves in a certain way, following the careers we imagine for them and making the decisions we’d make. We love them when they’re ours and the regard in which they’re held after that depends on whether their choices are acceptable to our absurdly overinflated opinions of what matters.
What’s abstract to outsiders is intensely personal for professional players and there’s one daunting career milestone they must deal with that supporters seldom consider.
Former Norwich City, Aston Villa and Peterborough United goalkeeper Jed Steer retired from playing at the age of 33, months after coming to an agreement to leave Peterborough a year ahead of schedule.
Steer’s departure from London Road revealed a player with his own grasp of the right thing to do. Optimistic by nature but committed to the highest standards, Steer took the end of his career as seriously as any other part of it.
“I love training, I love working hard, I love trying to improve every day,” Steer tells Goalkeeper.com.
“It just got to a stage where I couldn’t do that. I’d suffered with bad injuries throughout my career and I just couldn’t play or train or prepare the way I wanted to. I didn’t have that same drive to keep improving.
“It became just trying to stay fit, doing the minimum possible before the weekend, and it took a large chunk of the enjoyment out of it for me, mainly because of the physical side and not being able to work every single day to keep improving.”
Steer is beloved at Villa Park, where he was employed for a decade but found his time limited by injuries, circumstance and competition in the goalkeeping department.
He speaks in glowing terms about Neil Cutler, with whom he worked as Villa’s goalkeeping coach, and former Villa manager Dean Smith. It was under Smith that Steer achieved a career highlight by performing a starring role in the club’s return to the Premier League.
It was a case of needs must for Villa but it’s why Steer is held in such esteem by supporters.
“So many top footballers don’t play in the Premier League,” says Steer. “I grew up dreaming of playing in the Premier League and I was fortunate to do that. When we got promoted, I signed a new contract at Villa and I was one injury away from playing in the Premier League.
“You hope for more opportunities but it wasn’t to be. I have no regrets over trying to challenge myself to go and play in the Premier League.
Steer was a young goalkeeper at Norwich when Canaries boss Paul Lambert moved to Villa in 2012 and soon followed him to the West Midlands. The game changed significantly in the years he spent there or on loan with Doncaster Rovers, Yeovil Town, Huddersfield Town, Charlton Athletic, and Luton Town.
“There was a lot less emphasis on having the ball at your feet when I started out,” he says. “It was more about kicking it long. If there was a short pass on then you did it, but you weren’t playing in the tight spaces and breaking lines like goalkeepers are asked to do now.
“It’s an area all goalkeepers had to work on. It depends on the manager you play for and under Dean Smith, when he came into Villa, that’s what he wanted, so that’s what we’d work on with [Cutler].
“I think it became quite a strength of mine. When I moved to Peterborough that was the way Darren Ferguson wanted to play, to build up from the back, and we had the players to do that.
“I felt as if I fitted in quite nicely there. When you’ve got players who will take the ball anywhere on the pitch and have confidence in themselves and their ability, our life becomes easier because we can give the ball, they make angles, they move quickly, and they’ll play forward when they can rather than just giving it straight back to you.”
Steer is tactically minded, a trait that comes through loud and clear in the media work he does for Villa or for local radio in Norfolk. He credits the managers he played under with infusing him with knowledge almost by osmosis.
“Because of the way those teams played, the goalkeeper’s always involved in building the play, so you’re always switched on in analysis meetings and everything you do.
“Unai Emery was great to work with. I was injured at the time with him but he was massive on having everyone involved in the squad in the meetings so we all knew how his tactics worked. Dean Smith as well, and Darren Ferguson is a very good tactician who knows how he wants to play.”
Already blessed with a sharp eye for the tactical side of the game from the unique perspective of the goalkeeper, Steer is proving an engaging communicator when it comes to offering insight from the gantry too. Stripping complexities in chaos back to meaningful revelations is a balance few pundits manage.
Steer brings to his new work the same attitude to improvement that he had as a player, necessarily watching a lot of football and absorbing the strategic angles quite naturally. It’s been a more straightforward switch of focus than it is for some players.
“A lot of people really struggle to watch football for a while after they retire but I knew the time was right,” he says.
“I was fortunate. At one stage, I wondered if I’d be able to retire on my own terms. It can be difficult when you’re forced to step away from what you love. But I knew the time was right
“I had a right blast at it, loved it, achieved what I wanted to achieve. I played in the Premier League. I have no regrets.”
