Punishment for doing your job well is an unparalleled professional pressure.

My breadth of football experience, my injury history, and my all-or-nothing goal to become one of the best linebackers in the NFL, combined with all I'd been learning about the game's neurological effects on the brain, convinced me I'd be wise in choosing another career.

If I was a marginal guy or a practice squad player or a career-long special teamer, you take a hell of a lot less hits in those roles.

I couldn't really justify playing for money, and I think what I wanted to achieve put me at too great a risk, so I just decided on another profession.

My situation, and my opportunity, was the fourth tier in Swedish football and a place that nobody really wanted to go to. Of course it's turned out well for me.

By the time I was a young man, I lived with two deep struggles: I longed to become a cricketer, and I performed miserably in school. Cricket and tennis were all that I lived for. In India, this was a formula for failure.

When you put the interest of a kid on money instead of heart then you're destroying the beauty of our lives and our thought process, which should be about how much responsibilities you carry as an athlete and a citizen.

My philosophy for football is to be happy with what you're doing. When they say that you're one of the strongest in the world, you need to carry on in the same way as you do when they say that you're dead.