David Prutton ⭑ From A-Z since '92

It's an odd thing to say about someone who played 500 games of professional football in a fifteen year career, but in the end those were the games David Prutton needed to understand that playing football was not a culmination of his ambitions, but the start of new ones. 

It's a bit like former Leeds defender Darren O'Dea's experience, even down to both retiring relatively early, aged 32. O'Dea said it was hard to admit that, after "[fighting] since I was six years old to be a footballer", he wanted to stop because "I am so keen to start coaching ... [I had] began to think, 'I enjoy this and look forward to this more than I do to playing.'"

Unlike O'Dea, Prutton didn't retire because he had a new passion. Instead, after leaving Sheffield Wednesday, offers dried up. But since sending a message to Sky Sports that summer, following up on some punditry work, his subsequent move into TV presenting has given him as much if not more satisfaction than playing. 

"I much prefer doing this to playing football," Prutton told his old teammate Si Ferry on the Open Goal podcast. "I've been fortunate enough to work on play-off games at Wembley, which are fantastic. And having played at Wembley in a play-off game, I remember going back in my suit and just being sat there and thinking, 'Thank Christ I'm not putting a kit on and running around that pitch'." 

The Wembley play-off game Prutton played in was enough to put anyone off football: he was in the Leeds team that slumped to a 1-0 defeat to Doncaster Rovers in 2008. Nobody on Leeds' side played well that day, but Prutton had been among the best of a long, dramatic season. Starting summer 2007 in administration and starting 2007/08 with a fifteen point deduction, Leeds were the only team close — equal to, in fact — champions Swansea's 27 wins. 

Prutton was a cult-hero of high quality, a committed leader in midfield, and a welcome continuation of scruffy looking rock-blokes in the centre of the pitch. Before a pre-season game at York, Prutton says, a Leeds fan starting asking him about the players. "He asked, 'What about this Prutton lad?' I had to tell him it was me in case he started slagging me off. In the second half I was warming up and the same fella and his mates were all chanting, 'There's only one Shaun Derry'. Didn't have a clue who I was."

But with long hair down past his shoulders, big sideburns, an alice band, hollow cheekbones and a mellow expression, Prutton was soon, to Leeds fans, Jesus. He was in his mid-twenties but loved seventies classic rock, and by the time he got to Leeds he was in the mood to show what was what with music and fashion. "The Kaiser Chiefs came into training," he said back then, "Lovely lads, but they all looked very bizarre in shorts. They're used to skinny jeans, I guess." 

He was just getting into yoga at the time, too, firstly for the physical benefit, "But it also helps in a mental sense as well. I come in after training and do 45 minutes. It helps settle me down. You can't be serene all the time, but it is nice to push myself that way." Overall, he said, "The Jesus reference is a bit bizarre, and I decided recently to have a shave, but there are worse role-models around than the son of God."

Part of Prutton's inner peace at Leeds came from once being derided as a worse role-model than Satan himself, in the eyes of the Daily Mail, anyway. It was a curious, infamous episode for a player who, as a youngster, had been praised for his attitude and willing. He'd moved from Hull — where he said he used to enjoy watching Peter Swan — to join Nottingham Forest's academy under Paul Hart, who had run the Leeds United academy when it was producing everyone from Noel Whelan to Alan Smith and was now tending to Jermaine Jenas and Michael Dawson. "I know it's a cliche, but footballers have to be athletes now," Prutton said, as a 21-year-old star graduate. "You need to spend your day off relaxing, eating the right foods."