Lee Cattermole was out running this summer, a couple of miles from his home in Northumberland. Your head can clear in moments like that and realisation brought his legs to a dead halt. He turned and walked back to his house, pondering something he had been skirting for a while. He stood under the hot jet of his shower. He grabbed a beer from the fridge. He sat down with Claire, his wife. “That’s it, I’m done,” he said.

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Just like that, one part of Cattermole’s life was over. He was now a retired professional footballer. “It was such a big thing, I almost wanted a lump in my throat,” he says, but nothing came. He felt settled, calm, ready for whatever happens next. Beside him, on the sofa, Claire was weeping. “When I look back, it’s like my mind was made up before I made it,” he says. “It was a decision that had to be made. It needed to be sawn off.”

The need was not physical; Cattermole’s body is fine. He is 32 now and if COVID-19 and lockdown had not happened, he might still be in Holland, playing for VVV-Venlo. He might be somewhere else – there were offers over the summer – but although he had been keeping fit, training on his own, he had not spoken to an agent since March. “That’s a big sign when I think about it,” he says. “It means I wasn’t really looking.”

A few days before his run, Cattermole had spoken to a sports psychologist, “someone who didn’t know me at all. I wanted to make sure my thinking was logical. I told him everything. He said, ‘You’ve obviously got passion and energy and you need to direct it, whether it’s playing on for a couple of years or stopping now’.” That resonated; Cattermole was not a 50 per cent player and he is the same as a man. He is everything or he is out.

“I’ve always been really serious about coaching; it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he says. “I’m someone who is all-in or not in at all and it just feels like an opportunity to give this a real go, to put all my energy into something new. It’s like starting again, going back to when I made my debut at 17. I need to earn the right to be a good coach. There’s a lot to learn.”

He launched himself into his education in the same way he launched himself into tackles for Middlesbrough, Wigan Athletic, Sunderland then VVV. There were 12 days in Belfast, beginning his UEFA B and A Licence courses through the Irish Football Association. “Honestly, I hardly slept,” he says. “I was waking up in the middle of the night, writing things down, full of ideas.” He came away “with a clear idea of how I want a team to play, how I want it all to feel”.

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He has been coaching at Middlesbrough, his hometown club, four days a week, helping out with the kids off his own bat, watching and chatting, doing a bit of training, networking and listening and soaking up information. This is now who he is. He has always been a natural leader, a captain, and this is the next step. The only question is, where will a chance arise? What will it look like?

In September last year, The Athletic spent some time with Cattermole at VVV, a quirky, underdog club with a minuscule budget. On the face of it, it felt like an unlikely posting for a bulldog midfielder, except that he is nothing like his caricature. He is thoughtful, funny, with a lust for travel, for seeking out conversation. He has matured in public. And he has been moored and anchored by Claire, a corporate lawyer.

We would love you to read that story, but it does not need to be retold. And Cattermole has spoken enough about the extremes of Sunderland, those Premier League years and then the headlong decline. Instead, these are fragments which mark a career just ended and sketch out the start of another, the links of a chain. This is what he thinks about. “I feel like I’ve only found out who I really am in the last five years,” he says.

January 2, 2006. Newcastle United 2-2 Middlesbrough

“Like these things usually do, my league debut for Middlesbrough came about because of injuries to other players,” Cattermole says. “I was a kid. Steve McClaren gave me my chance; it’s a huge risk for a manager every time he does that when their job is on the line. I’ve had a couple of games of golf with Steve recently and we were laughing about it. It was Steve Harrison, his coach, who suggested putting me in, who said I was ready.

“In fairness, I was competing every day in training. Later on, at Sunderland, young lads would train with the first team and wouldn’t tackle the experienced pros. I’d say to them, ‘You don’t get respect from players or staff from jumping out of tackles. We all want to win in training, so if I’m on your team, tackle, challenge’. I’d done that at Middlesbrough and it earned me my place. That was my opportunity, the opportunity I need now as a coach.”

July 2008, Wigan Athletic

“Things change overnight. You get into the first team and your life goes into fast-forward. You go from being 17 with absolutely nothing to 18 and on the verge of having a right few quid and living in the limelight, getting attention off people, fans. I played for Steve and then under Gareth Southgate at right midfield and it was good, but I knew I wanted to play in the middle. When Wigan and Steve Bruce came in for me it was a big pull.

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“My agent asked me if I wanted to bring my dad down when I signed but I said no. At Middlesbrough, I was always going to be seen as a youth-team player, but I was walking in at Wigan as a man. I’m not turning up with my dad holding my hand. That transformation happened with the click of a finger. I wasn’t the young lad who had been cleaning boots a couple of years before. I was a first-team player.”

September 11, 2010. Wigan Athletic 1-1 Sunderland

Cattermole was running again. Running for running’s sake, on a hotel treadmill, running himself empty, running out his fury. It was his second season at Sunderland – he had followed Bruce there from Wigan – and his first as captain. He was sent off twice in three league matches. “That was fucking hard to take,” he says. “It was a big one for me. I put my coach’s hat on now: what would the manager have been thinking?”

By then, he had a reputation. “The was a spell for a few years where every time I made a tackle, I got a yellow card,” he says. “There was a bit of influence from opposition crowds, the way players reacted, but all that comes because of things I’d done earlier in my career, the way I played. It was nobody’s fault but my own. The first red card I wasn’t too concerned about, but the second one really hurt.

“I was living in Yarm at the time and I went to the gym at Rockliffe Hall at about 10pm that Saturday night and just ran and ran and ran, for about an hour. I didn’t speak to anybody. I didn’t deal with things very well when I was younger. I bottled things up. The older you get, you find a way of coping, but I should have fronted it up or had a chat with the manager. I was probably making things worse, but I just ran.

“It wasn’t really about letting people down. When I made mistakes, it was never careless, it was more over-trying. I always had the mindset of ‘if you want me to run, I’ll run and run and give and give’. I couldn’t do enough. Even when I was a schoolboy at Boro, in all the meetings the staff would say, ‘He tries to do everybody’s jobs’. You end up running into mistakes. You run into tackles, red cards, injuries.”

March 4, 2012. Newcastle United 1-1 Sunderland

“The previous season, we lost 5-1 at Newcastle,” Cattermole says. “We were young and dynamic and we were flying at the time, seventh in the Premier League. We fancied ourselves, turned up in posh suits. I hate it when people say the derby is just another game because it’s nonsense. There’s a buzz in the North East building up over two or three weeks, there’s miles more attention, your phone goes berserk.

“The whole day is something different, an unbelievable experience, but it was men against boys. Maybe we didn’t realise what we were walking into, but we were bullied. We got done. I looked around the pitch and we couldn’t get near anyone, couldn’t make a tackle. It was a big lesson about how to approach a match. Next year, the suits would be out the window. No music, nothing. It’s just game on.

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“When it came around again, I knew what I was going to do. I’d written a note to myself in the hotel: ‘Let our lads know we’re in a game today, that we’re mixing it’. I was determined to make a tackle early. I think it was about a minute in (on Cheick Tiote). Martin O’Neill, our manager, was shouting at Phil Bardsley – ‘Get on to Catts, calm him down’! – and so Bardo was shouting at me, but I felt as calm as I ever have.

“You can have all the tactics in the world, but sometimes you need to put a stamp on games. It was never to hurt anybody. We went ahead, Newcastle equalised late on to get a 1-1 draw which was frustrating, but we gave a good account of ourselves.”

There is a postscript. Cattermole was sent off after the final whistle for swearing. “I gave the referee a bit too much,” he says, laughing now. “Martin hammered me in the dressing-room afterwards, but that was a big game for us. Those are the games I’m going to miss.” There is another postscript: Sunderland went unbeaten in nine consecutive derbies, including a stretch of six victories in a row.

2013, Gus Poyet

“You need to give players restrictions,” Cattermole says. “That’s where your responsibility as a manager is important. I got better as a player when I put boundaries in my game. Gus gave me that. He said, ‘Listen, this is your job, worry about that. If you do your job, the lad over there can do his job, the team functions and suddenly it all makes sense’.

“I still had problems because I was being asked to do something completely different, but red and yellow cards happen when you play the game on the edge. I hated feeling relaxed on the pitch. I took players with me when I played at a certain tempo.

“That edge was natural. I competed and had this unbelievable drive, whether in training or in a game. I don’t think I’d have played at the top level without that; maybe that’s where a manager would probably say, ‘I don’t want him to change; we’ll accept one red card a season’. Can you play on the edge now? I don’t think the game is played as fast as it was. It’s more disciplined, more cagey. There are less loose balls. It’s not as unpredictable.

“There were a couple of managers I played for where it felt like we really knew our jobs. That comforts you as a player. That’s what you want. You think, ‘Yeah, this is good, because we’re going out and everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing’. At other times, I played for managers and felt like I didn’t know my job, although the huge turnover of players at Sunderland played a part in that.

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“I absolutely loved playing under Gus. If I hadn’t been managed by him, I wouldn’t be going into coaching now, I’m sure of that. It’s not like I have to speak to him all the time, because you’ve got to be true to yourself, and all the managers I played under shaped me to a certain degree, but Gus got me to look at the game in a different light.”

2017, Colorado

“I’d fought off a hip injury for a couple of years and didn’t realise how serious it was. I always wanted to play, so we found ways to get me onto the pitch. It was difficult to get up in the mornings, I’d sleep with a pillow between my legs, but it was always the team before me. I was never worried about my own performance, as long as we got the points we needed.

“I never thought, ‘Shit, I was off the pace today’, or ‘The fella from the Northern Echo has only given me a five out of 10’, but it got to the point where I wasn’t able to influence a game or make us better. I was making us worse. I fell over in training one day. I couldn’t turn. I had no stability. It was pissing down with rain, freezing. The fitness coach looked at me and said, ‘Go in’. I got a bit teary as I walked off. ‘What am I doing here…?’

“I’d had a few epidurals which weren’t nice and I was really worried about the pain. And it was just a shit year, the season we got relegated from the Premier League. I flew over to Colorado for an operation and on the flight I filled out four or five sheets of A4 paper, brainstorming, writing about different areas of the club that you’d have to think about as a coach, from recruitment to fitness and everything else.

“The operation went well, but I knew that coaching was what I wanted to do. I’ve still got those bits of paper somewhere. I’ve got loads of notebooks. Before games in the Premier League, I’d write on those post-it notes you get at hotels, giving myself little reminders: check your shoulders, receiving positions, complete basics. They were reference points, just to get into the game, to get me through the first 15 minutes. Coaching those basics is so important.”

2019, VVV-Venlo

“You’ve got to be willing to make huge sacrifices to be a top player. For a long time, I made those sacrifices, but I got to a stage where I was more concerned about the team I was in and what the ideas of the coaches were. Because I have such a clear idea of how I want to do it, I was at the point where playing was almost frustrating. I didn’t always believe we were doing the right things.

“The opportunity to play in Holland offered so much from a coaching perspective. I wanted to learn, see how they did it in a different country, how they went about everything. I thrived on it. Moving clubs at 31 or 32 is harder than when you’re 20 because you have a family, you’re more settled, but I wanted to travel, see it. Venlo have said I’m always welcome to go back and I’d love do some coaching in their academy. I’d definitely be interested in coaching abroad.”

There are no regrets. Unlike some, Cattermole has not struggled with losing the daily regimen of being a player because, he says, “I know what I want to do.” He has enjoyed fish and chips on a Friday night, a glass of wine – he has a keen interest – and it is only when the weekend rolls around that he feels that old tickle. “Not playing is weird,” he says. “I’ve got this itch.” And so on Saturdays, he pounds the pavements; perhaps he will give next year’s Great North Run a go.

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Retirement has not meant greater freedom because lockdown has shrunk the world, so those plans to travel or to ski are on hold. Away from work, he has done “the same as everybody – lots of Zoom calls, watched loads of football, decluttered the house”. Like all of us, he is desperate to go to games in person, to see people, to spend time with former colleagues, to hoover up information, to learn.

But it is also a form of liberation. “I’m getting up in the morning knowing that the only person who can stop me is me,” he says.

Volunteering at Middlesbrough has closed one door and opened another. “The first time I went back, it brought out all those old memories, stuff you’ve parked away for 10 or 15 years,” he says. “There are photographs from teams I was in up on the walls. They’ve been brilliant with me, different class.

“Even being in the coaches’ room before the day starts has been great, seeing how they plan, listening to the feedback, what they get out of it and how it plays out. As a footballer, you train every day for years, but if you gave a player a set of cones and said, ‘Put a session on’, they wouldn’t have a clue. It’s done for you. Once the session is up and running, your knowledge of the game comes in, but that organisation and detail is so important.

“For me, the leadership bit comes naturally. It’s not something I’m worried about. But I’m trying to make sure I can coach my ideas, because knowing what I want and being able to get it are two totally different things. How do you get your players to understand? How do you show them, make them do it? And you can go on as many courses as you want, but the stuff I’m hearing from Neil Warnock at Boro is priceless. How do you teach that man-management?”

What would a Cattermole team look like? How can you say for definite, when there are so many imponderables? “There are so many different factors, whatever level you’re working at; recruitment, who is fit, whether you’ve got pace in your team, what makes people tick,” he says. “I want to learn about all of it.”

The more he learns, the more he craves. “For me, it’s about slowing down!” he says. “Once I get on to something, I really want to do it. I’d love to take my time over two or three years, get the right qualifications and some experience, but things move so quickly now. You can be in and out of a job and your career can be over within 18 months. I’m just trying to plot out the right way of doing it.

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“There are probably three options. Start at an academy with a group of under-18s or 23s. You could go in somewhere with an established manager and try to learn from them. Or you go in as a head coach at a lower-league club, which I wouldn’t rule out because you get to mould things exactly as you want, but your staff would be hugely important.

“And it’s all very well me saying what I’d like to do, but I’m not expecting to get a job straight away. Steve McClaren has said that getting the opportunity is the hard thing. I’ve got no qualms, but if you want to work towards something, if you think you’re going to be good at it and you believe in yourself, then you can get there.”

Cattermole has already done that once, the fearless kid who shook Newcastle’s bones at 17. He is still trim and wiry, still hungry, but he is older and wiser and more rounded.

And so who is he, this man? What is it that he has found out about himself? “I’m understated, I think,” he says. “Genuine. I try to lead a simple life. In football, most goals come from other people’s mistakes and the more you complicate it, the more mistakes you make. The more I keep things simple in my life, the easier it seems to be.

“I know what I like to do in my spare time, what I like to eat and drink. I don’t want that to sound like I’m not open to new experiences, because I’m an open book and I want to try things, 100 per cent. But it’s maturing, isn’t it? I’m settled. I don’t feel like I need to follow a trend to keep me engaged. I’m comfortable in my own skin. I feel happy in who I am.”

What he was: footballer. What comes next: coach.

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