The life of Daniel Bennet, professional football for Singapore
Born in England but came to Singapore at the age of 2 Daniel Bennett is a professional footballer who represented Singapore on the Singaporean football team, but now age 41, unfortunately, isn’t able to represent Singapore anymore.
What inspired him to pursue football as a carrier option was as a child he played a lot of football and he found that he was naturally quite good at football, he was quite passionate towards football, “strive to be the best he possibly could be”. Bennet had gotten an education at UWCSEA Dover in Singapore, and graduated in 1996, his father was head of the college at UWCSEA Dover for about 11 years. Near graduation, Bennet had started to play football in the local system as well as the school system. Bennett had moved around a couple of times when it came to football.
Once he had finished University, Bennet wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his life, he was surprised that he had been invited to play on a Singaporean football team. He was shocked as he originally believed that he was going to get a job that was in relation to sports science as that’s what he had studied in university.
Bennett took the offer as he had “always loved Singapore from a young age”, at the time he owned a British passport it was quite difficult to come back and work in Singapore. A few years later he was offered a position on a division 1 football team in England. team Later he was offered to come back to Singapore and play for the Singaporean football team in exchange for the Singaporean passport.
As a football player, Bennet had to train a lot to make sure his skill level was maintained or improved upon, during a football game he could have been drilled upon a variety of things, as long as it would help his team improve, it didn’t have to be strategic, as it could have been physical training as well.
Currently, he is working with the Active SG to help Singapore become more active, he helps offer opportunities to play sports for kids and their family. During the time he played in Singapore, he noticed that the contracts were shorter here than in England. In Singapore, a contract was 1-2 years long while in England it was around 4-5 years. Since the contracts were so short he was always on edge thinking about whether or not he would be signed on again or if it would have been the end of his time on the team, because of this he would make sure he wasn’t going to get injured near the end of his contract and just overall made sure he was doing the best he can.
At certain times he would have been more worried than others, for example when younger players would come in since he was getting old this put more stress on him, he would worry that he would have been replaced by one of them. It has recently become 20 years since Bennett had started playing football professionally, he had managed to prolong his career by working with active SG. But Bennett is reaching the end of his football carrier.
Currently, Bennett is looking for other carrier options. He is doing this because the carrier of a football player is rather short, according to Daniel Bennett, the usually end to a footballers carrier is at age 35, but he has managed to extend the lifetime of his carrier by quite a bit. At age 35 he decided to get a license to become a real estate agent, this is because he already loved looking at property, he also already had a friend in the real estate industry. He mentioned that he likes being a real estate agent because it doesn’t interfere with his football as he is able to do it anytime and if he enjoys it and wants to pursue it after football he already has his business set up.
In 2018 Bennet had decided to try out teaching. He had decided that he would like to try become a PE teacher, he tried out teaching at UWCSEA, both the east and Dover campus. Although he didn’t enjoy it too much, he is still going to consider it as a potential carrier option for the future.
Bennet said that considering all that time he spent on the Singapore team he would have gone back to England to play for the club there because he prefers being able to play at a higher skill level because he enjoys it a lot more.
As an athlete Bennett had to make sacrifices of his own, he had to make sure he was the best he could be. To make sure he was at his peak he wasn’t able to eat fatty or oily foods, although this wasn’t an issue for him as he grew up being told to not eat these kinds of foods.
As well as eating right Bennet also monitored his sleep patterns to make sure he had an adequate amount of sleep and that there weren’t any anomalies occurring in his sleep.
With every job there were still sacrifices to be made through leisure time, Bennett had to sacrifice his personal time and also time with his family.
Another thing he had to help manage his time was a routine to help make sure he was prepared before a game which helped make sure he was in the right state of mind so that he was confident when it came time to play the game.