By: Joel Eshun
Former Black Queens coach and player, Mercy Tagoe-Quarcoo has urged female footballers to start planning their lives beyond the pitch while they are actively playing.Mercy Tagoe-Quarcoo, the only Ghanaian to have worked on the pitch as a player, referee and coach used her own life experiences to advise female footballers at the just ended Malta Guinness and Ghana Football Association capacity building workshop on life outside the football field.
Mercy urged them to spend wisely with the little they make and use the rest to build something meaningful so that they can rely on it when they retire, whether willingly or due to injuries.She said most of her teammates are now struggling in life because they didn’t plan their lives well and she doesn’t want to see the current crop of players make the same mistakes.”It’s all about planning. Before I end one activity, another has already started.
I really needed the transition to be smooth and not to end one activity and wonder what to do next,” she explained.”I built my first house with the money I earned from my first World Cup in the USA. It’s about planning.
Even though I couldn’t finish it, I got it to a good level before I later completed it. All this while, I was working with the national service.”In as much as I was playing, I was thinking about what to do after football,” she stated.The Malta Guinness and the Ghana Football Association (GFA) workshop, dubbed ‘Life Outside Football Capacity Workshop,’ aimed at educating Ghanaian footballers on how to manage their finances to ensure a stable future.Mercy Tagoe-Quarcoo was a guest speaker alongside Neil Armstrong-Mortagbe, the head of Public Relations and Strategy at the GFA.