Footballer Gernot Trauner retires: “At 34, I had problems like a 60-year-old”

Gernot Trauner says retirement became the sensible choice when professional football stopped feeling like a game and became a weekly effort to get his body ready for the next match.

“I had been a footballer for 16 years,” Trauner says, adding that he could have imagined continuing but found the physical demands increasingly difficult. The previous year and a half had affected him especially hard. Once he announced his retirement, he felt liberated because the constant pressure to remain available disappeared.

He describes mornings when he would get up and feel pain somewhere in his body. During the season, even family outings with his children could leave him limited by aching knees. “I am 34 and sometimes have problems like a 60- or 70-year-old,” he recalls thinking.

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I am 34 and sometimes have problems like a 60- or 70-year-old.

Trauner says young players do not fully understand the price of elite sport until injuries force them to focus on their bodies. He remembers days when he could not walk down the stairs without pain, yet still played in the evening and sometimes delivered among his best performances. He managed that by repeatedly pushing his body to and beyond its limits, a strategy he now describes as deceptive because it hid the damage accumulating underneath.

The physical toll accelerated with every injury and operation. As more of the meniscus is removed, he says, the consequences build because the tissue serves a purpose. Both knees and his hips eventually became problems, followed by muscle injuries as his movement patterns changed. Trauner won the Dutch Eredivisie with Feyenoord in 2023, but he now speaks about the cost of sustaining a 16-year professional career and the pressures placed on elite players.

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The physical wear of elite sport is accelerated enormously.