A research on professional football players' perceptions of career termination experience

The purpose of this research is to determine the professional football players? perceptions of retirement experience in Turkey and to display, in a comparative way, whether these perceptions acquire a difference according to the independent variables obtained through personal information of individuals. Randomly selected, 384 retired individuals from professional football leagues (played in 1st, 2nd and 3rd leagues) who are living in city of Ankara participated into the study voluntarily. ?Personal Data Form? and ?Perception Scale of Professional Football Career Termination Experience (PSPFCTE)? were used in the study as the data-collection tools. It has been determined at the end of the research that individuals who retired from professional football, the scores getting from the scale are differed from the age, education level, duration of professional football playing, number of clubs that played, statute of leagues that played, playing in national teams, going school while playing football, injuries, evaluation of football career, statue of having an objective while beginning football and achieving that objective and reason of retirement from professional football. In the research, it has been observed that professional football players terminated their professional football career by their own decisions at the average of 27,22 age. Key Words: Football, career in football, career termination.