Five years after he was scouted for ADO’s youth academy in the The Hague, Netherlands, 16-year-old Michael Vakalopoulos was asked if he wanted to play in the Greek national team. It brought him a professional football career, with employers such as ADO, PSV, Vitesse and SC Veendam. At Pimco, the 31-year-old account manager can still put his energies into the company football team that he plays 5-a-side football with.
“Top sportsmen can train all day just to make 1/1000th of an improvement in their game. All those small improvements make the difference between success and failure. That discipline to keep learning and pushing yourself can be very important in the financial sector. We all have a tendency to become complacent or a bit lazy at times. That’s when you have to rely on your self-discipline.
I grew up in New York, where sport is an important part of everyone’s childhood. Unlike in Europe, the schools themselves organise sports competitions and put teams together. I signed up for as many different sports as I could: football, American football, lacrosse, basketball, tennis, and I played all day with my competitive brothers. I soon realised that I had a natural talent for ball sports.
When we moved to the Netherlands when I was 10, my parents allowed me to choose one sport, as they did not want to drive me from game to game. I chose the sport that almost everyone in my hometown played: football. A year after I joined the local football team, I was scouted for the youth academy of ADO Den Haag. When you’re young, you don’t think too far ahead, but in retrospect, that was a big moment in my life.”
Greek team
“I went through the different teams of the academy, got good reactions from my trainers and became captain of my team at 14. When I was 16, my club received an official invitation from the Greek Football Federation to include me in the Greek national youth team. I think that’s when I realised I could seriously pursue a career in football, and started playing for various Dutch teams: PSV Eindhoven, Vitesse Arnhem and SC Veendam.
Football was everything to me, from the moment I started youth training at ADO. Yet my parents thought differently. As long as I got good grades, I could keep playing football. They wanted me to always have the option of going straight to university. In the meantime, I trained almost every day and played a match every weekend. There was little time for making friends and doing other things that children do in their teenage years.
In the end, it was a cartilage damage in my knee that made me stop. The pain I had in my knee caught up with me time and time again. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the talent of Messi; I had to train harder than others to reach the top of my game. When I realised it would be difficult to push my body as far as it needed to, I decided to take a new path. Giving up was not easy and it will probably always be a sensitive subject for me, but in hindsight, quitting was the best decision I could have made.”
Pimco football team
“Sport is still a big part of my life. Although I cannot do all sports because of my knee, I have plenty of options left. My number one sport by far remains football. We have a PIMCO football team that we play 5-a-side with, which is great fun. I do miss the exciting competitive feeling of playing a game where a lot is at stake and where you have to win.
I have not lost my competitiveness, and I am convinced that this characteristic is also important in my current position as account manager. As a young footballer, playing with experienced players at a higher level, I already understood that being a senior has nothing to do with age, but with experience and skill.
The will to win motivates you to become better. If you work hard enough, you will gain experience and become better. In every big or small task, in every project in my career, I keep this in mind. Of course, you will lose once along the way, but if you stick to your path, you will emerge victorious in the end.”
This article is part of the Fondsnieuws (Investment Officer Luxembourg’s sister publication) summer series: sport and investing, in which former top athletes and current fanatics draw parallels between sport and the investment industry. This is the third episode. Earlier Emiel van den Heiligenberg of LGIM talked about his rowing career and Tim Soetens of Allianz Global Investors about his current passion for triathlons.