Perth-raised Tom King played at Liverpool and Man U before launching a new career
The world was at their feet - young Australian footballers blessed with talent before life took a twist. Tom Smithies continues our series looking at players whose careers ended too soon.
The world was at their feet - young Australian footballers blessed with talent before life took a twist. Tom Smithies continues our series looking at players whose careers ended too soon.
Tom King calls it his “get up and go” - the seemingly limitless reserves of energy that fuelled him to regularly fly from Perth to Parramatta for football training from the age of 10.
That allowed Manchester United to fly him across the world for training sessions throughout his teenage years.
That led him to captain Liverpool in the U19 Champions League in Europe and play at a junior World Cup.
And that now drives him to help develop football training apps whose downloads number close to 100,000 around the world.
You can add in a completed business degree and yet Tom King is still only 24. And he’s only just got started.
After being marked in his youth as one of Australia’s most promising defenders, his is a story of injuries sabotaging talent, but also of determination to find new talents and not let the story end.
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King is also an ambassador for the DT38 Foundation in memory of Dylan Tombides, who featured in this series and was a friend and clubmate at Stirling Lions Soccer Club when the pair were 10-year-olds in Perth.
The two were deemed good enough to be flown across Australia to train with Parramatta Eagles, a club linked Manchester United — which is why United began flying him to Manchester for a fortnight’s training every year.
“I don’t think at that age you take it that seriously,” King told The Sunday Telegraph. “You enjoy being challenged, and at United you’re training with some of the best young players in the world.
“But you’re not starstruck. It really clicked when I was 14 or 15 and understood that I was going to be trialling to move to a very serious level.”
In the end, after those trials, it was Liverpool who put an offer on the table of a two-year scholarship. With teammates including Raheem Sterling and Jonjo Shelvey the dream was on.
“It’s so competitive there — as soon as I arrived, they moved me to leftback as they felt I wasn’t tall enough for centreback,” he said.
“I was biding my time there, at the club my dad supported and I grew up with. But there were very good players in front of me. So when Stoke offered me a year’s deal, I decided to try my luck.”
But “luck” was the commodity in least supply from that point.
As he left Liverpool, and moved from Stoke to Bristol City to Melbourne City, at every key point his body would break down.
First came a stress fracture in his back, followed by a torn hamstring. Then his groin went, properly, to the point he needed surgery. Ankle ligaments were torn.
“It’s tough — you have to keep coming back to why you do it,” he said. “If you lose the love, it becomes too hard.
“For 90 per cent of my career I was loving it and you tell yourself the injuries and the reverses aren’t unique to you.”
Alone in a foreign land, King appreciated the care from Liverpool but felt home calling. “It taught me that you need to find a work-life balance, you need hobbies and friends.”
And so eventually he went back to Perth to start a new life.
When he picked up the local paper, he read about a tech start-up based locally that was developing a football app. Formalytics wanted to use an iPhone’s camera and ball-tracking software to measure the power and trajectory of anyone’s penalties, allowing them to measure their data against friends, peers or even Lionel Messi.
In his own words, King hassled the CEO for a meeting, then hassled him for a job working on the app, becoming one of a handful of employees.
“We launched it in 2018 during the World Cup, and basically it went to the top of the App Store charts with 75,000 downloads — we knocked FIFA’s World Cup app off No.1,” he said.
“Off the back of that, we collaborated with the MLS in America doing fan engagement projects with them, getting 13-to-18-year-olds interested in the national league.”
Invited to be one of only seven tech companies working with European football’s governing body UEFA, Formalytics is building up to a demo launch of products at the Champions League final early next month — including an app that tracks and creates data for a user taking a variety of set pieces.
Eventually the company wants to create a body of data of their skills, just like FIFA playing cards, for everyday players.
King sees far-reaching benefits for players of all levels.
“I was lucky enough to be spotted aged 10, but 99 per cent of players don’t get that opportunity,” he said.
“If I was 12 or 13 again, I could use the app to measure my attributes, and tell a club that I had something worth looking at.”
King accepts the end of his own football career set him up for this new adventure.
“I would have liked to make it, just to see how good I could have been if my body had held up.
“I’ll never know that. But for all it being a cliché, I tend to believe that things happen for a reason. If all those things hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t be in this position, doing this job.”
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