Former Manchester United Player Who Quit Football To Join Priesthood 

Shying off the tradition of pitch – coach transition, a former premier league star took a strange route. Beginning his pitch career at Old Trafford, luck never knocked at his door to appear in the first- eleven of Boss, Alex Ferguson.

Throughout the stay in a red devils’ t-shirt, the now Reverend Father Phil Mulryne, only made one appearance in the EPL before joining Norwich, in 1999.The Northern Ireland citizen claim, he ditched football where he was pocketing £600,000 per year as a pro player but revealed, he got ‘bored’ of the money, cars, nightclubs and the attention of women”.

Speaking on his transition into priesthood, Mulryne once told Norwich’s official website back 2014:

“It’s hard to pin down a particular moment. I would say it started in my last year at Norwich, not explicitly and I wasn’t thinking about it at that time but I started to get dissatisfied with the whole lifestyle.

“We have a wonderful life as a footballer and I was very privileged, but I found with all the surrounding stuff that eventually there was a kind of emptiness with it. I was quite shocked – why am I not happy when I have everything that young men want?” He says.

After retiring from football in 2009 at 31 from a non-league King’s Lynn club and coming home; the pitch elite says that life completely started to change and everything came to a halt. Completely upside down!

As the case, he started exploring his life, tracing from young age where, he bumped on a priesthood dream which turned into a new leaf.

“I volunteered at a homeless shelter for a while. I started going back to mass and I started praying again on a regular basis. I just found a real sense of fulfilment with it. Football was huge highs and lows and here was something that was giving me a steady sense of contentment.”

Following his young age, dream and passion, Mulryne joined Saint Malachy’s Seminary, Belfast and studied philosophy for two years at Queen’s University Belfast.

In 2017, he was ordained as a priest according to the Dominican Order. Currently, he oversees a congregation at St. Mary’s Priory Church in Cork as he dorns in the name Reverend Father Phil Mulryne