Udo Onwere: ‘Being a lawyer is easier than being a footballer’
The former Fulham midfielder tells Catherine Baksi how his sports background has influenced his legal career — particularly his new venture with Jamie Redknapp
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/udo-onwere-interview-lawyer-footballer-m9cx7kz0g
Udo Onwere — a former Fulham FC midfielder — trained as a lawyer after hanging up his football boots at the end of a 12-year career on the pitch.
He is now a partner at Bray & Krais, a specialist music, sports and entertainment firm, where he leads the sports and private client teams — and the 53-year-old brings clients and skills from his time in the beautiful game.
He recently teamed up with his fellow former footballer and long-time friend Jamie Redknapp to launch M&C Saatchi Football, a sports management company that provides career planning, mentoring and legal advice to young footballers.
Aware of the impact of the competitive and pressured environment for young professional footballers, Onwere is keen to “give back” to the sport that he loves and ensure that they are properly equipped.
Since its launch a fortnight ago, seven players have signed up for the company’s services. “Jamie does the mentoring and I’m tasked with dealing with all the legal side of things,” Onwere says. The duo try to involve players’ parents in an effort to “give them a dose of realism”. While the players are all talented, Onwere and Redknapp are keen to ensure they understand the stresses and pressures of success and failure.
There are, he says, two things that the young players need to understand: “How to deal with disappointment and to realise that they will always have to prove themselves.”
Comparing his two careers, Onwere says: “I always maintain that being a lawyer is easier than being a footballer.” He adds that he respects both professions “intensely, but I think there is an element of being a footballer that people might overlook. It is obviously quite glamorous and enjoyable, but there is a lot of performance pressure that comes with that.”
In contrast to being a lawyer, where there can be “pockets of pressure and deadlines”, he says, “being a footballer is like going into an exam hall and having an examination every week. It’s brutally meritocratic.”
Onwere had a stint at Lincoln City during his 12-year football career
ALAMY
Onwere, who retired from professional football 25 years ago, misses the fun aspects of his former career — teammates, locker-room camaraderie and “the adrenaline of the big wins; but it’s not something that I would run back to”.
Born in Hammersmith, Onwere loved sport and football “from the moment I could walk”. Growing up in west London in the Seventies and Eighties, with his brother and two sisters, he recalls a “happy, loving childhood, with loads of fun”.
But in 1988, when he left school after his GCSEs to take a youth training place with Chelsea, his parents, who had come to England from Nigeria during the Biafran war, “were not particularly pleased”. His father had been a market trader in Nigeria and his mother was a nurse. In common with many West African parents, he says, they prized education.
It was three years after the Heysel Stadium disaster in Belgium, in which 39 people died after crowd trouble between rival fans led to a crush, and Onwere says that “football was in a different place than it is now”. There was, he recalls, a lot of hooliganism and racism associated with the game, adding: “It wasn’t an environment that was particularly welcoming to someone who was black.”
Looking back, he can understand his parents’ reticence, but at the time says “I was just thinking they should be super proud and pleased”. The step up from schoolboy to club football was “intense”. At the same time as coping with the training, Onwere says “you’re growing up — your body is changing and your brain is changing”.
After a two-year apprenticeship at Chelsea, Onwere signed his first professional contract with rival Fulham. Over 12 years he also played for Lincoln City, Dover Athletic, Blackpool, Barnet, Aylesbury United, Hayes and Maidenhead United, before retiring in 2000. “I wasn’t injured, I just made a conscious decision that I wanted to get into something else that was going to give me an element of stability and independence,” he says.
Having enjoyed negotiating his own contracts during his footballing career, Onwere turned to law, completing an access course at Middlesex University before doing a degree. “I was reasonably academic at school and knew I would be able to deal with the amount of reading that was required,” Onwere says.
The biggest change was getting used to modern methods of teaching. “When I left school in 1988, it was all blackboards and chalk” — but 12 years later, the world had moved on and Onwere had to learn how to type and use a computer.
After law school, he joined Thomas Eggar (now Irwin Mitchell) as a trainee in 2006. Enjoying the “emotional intelligence” and “collaboration” required for non-contentious work, he qualified into the firm’s private client practice two years later.
After a stint at Farrer & Co, he was head-hunted by Bray & Krais to launch its private client and sports teams. Building on his playing background, Onwere advises high-profile sportsmen and women, particularly professional footballers, managers and directors. His clients include the former player for England and Manchester United Rio Ferdinand and England and Chelsea siblings Reece and Lauren James.
He also does regulatory and disciplinary work as a judicial panel member of the Football Association.
Private client work includes handling the multimillion-pound estate of the One Direction singer Liam Payne. Cheryl Tweedy, a former partner of Payne, has been appointed administrator of the estate with the law firm founder, Richard Bray.
Onwere lives in Dorking in Surrey, with his wife, who works in marketing. He enjoys swimming, watching football and spending time with his family. While “Fulham will always be in my heart”, he does not follow a club, but his three grown-up children all support Arsenal.
