Ívar Ingimarsson: How I won the football lottery | OneFootball

The ability to carve out a career at in professional football has always been nigh-on impossible for even the vast majority of children who grow up playing the game at academy level.

That mind-numbingly slim chance reduces even further once a player has passed the age of 20. It really is so rare.

But Ívar Ingimarsson defied the odds. He had played over 100 top-flight games in his native Iceland, but it was only when he was 22 that he signed his first professional contract at Brentford in November 1999.

He turned down an offer from Hammarby in Sweden in favour of a short-term loan at Torquay United and subsequent contract in west London. Ron Noades and scout John Griffin had watched him score on his debut against Barnet and countryman Hermann Hreiðarsson had put in a good word after his move to Wimbledon a month earlier.

Making it on the big stage had not been in his plans growing up.

“If you are only playing amateur football, it's difficult to get better,” he says. “In my case, I probably was not thinking about professional football maybe until I was 16-18, when I got into the Icelandic national teams.

“When we started to play with boys of the same age, who were already professional, I thought ‘OK, I could do this’ and then I really stepped up in trying to do so.

“There were people who led the way. We always had professional football players who were really good. We had some going to Germany, we had some going to England, like [ex-Tottenham and Bolton defender] Guðni Bergsson who did well.

“When you see other people do that, you aspire to do the same, but I had many trials and many failed tests.”

Signing the deal at Brentford brought an overwhelming sense of relief.

“When you get the contract, you know you have now maybe two, three years to actually improve and show what you can do.

“I always saw the players in England were better coached than I was. But surely I must have done something right if I managed to get the contract in England and to get the same facilities and same training? I was always confident I would get better.

“I got my first salary and I went out and spent it on a very expensive leather jacket, which I still regret today! It also helped me pay for a huge phone bill to Iceland!”

But adapting to life in England was not as straightforward as Ingimarsson might have imagined.

“I would say, for my first year, year-and-a-half at Brentford, I was always on my way back home,” he admits. “Even though I was 22, I thought it was hard.

“I wouldn't say I was very well received to begin with, either, specifically because I was coming after Hermann. He had been a very well-paid player at Brentford and I think a lot of the young players at Brentford thought I was coming in on the same terms, so I was kicked left, right and centre in training, which was tough and could break some people

“My belief has always been in welcoming people in a way they can play their best football. In the end, they're going to be team-mates and if they do well, then your life on the pitch is going to get better.

“That said, I came from an environment of amateurs. What I realised very quickly in England is a lot of people look at the professional career as a lottery ticket, not only for them, but also their families. So, understandably, the competition is much harder.

“I also came to England when the culture of drinking and gambling was still there but fading out. In the years after, it changed with foreign managers and foreign people coming into the game. The diet, the nutrition and the training started to change quickly and I think it suited me better.”

Ingimarsson played 25 times in the Second Division in 1999/00 as Brentford finished 17th in a disappointing follow-up to their Third Division title-winning campaign.

He missed only four league games the next season, which was, again, pretty forgettable, save for the fact the Bees reached the LDV Vans Trophy final, which they lost 2-1 to Port Vale at the Millenium Stadium, after Michael Dobson’s third-minute opener had been cancelled out.

That fired him up.

“In the league, we hadn't been doing well and then we had this carrot, which could have set us up for the next season. In the end, nobody remembers the person in second place in these games.

“I'm a great believer in that, if you see the other team celebrating, that is a feeling that you don't want to get again. You learn from it and it makes you push you even harder. You are in football to win and definitely not to lose because it's the most horrible feeling.”

The former Iceland international had, by his own admission, his best season in a Brentford shirt in 2001/02 under Steve Coppell. “The way he did things changed something. It was definitely the kick-off of my career,” he adds.

He remembers his partnership with Darren Powell fondly.

“We had a very good relationship,” he recalls. “He was very strong and I think our partnership probably set me up as a centre-half, which I then more or less played throughout my career.

“We came from different backgrounds and we didn't hang around outside football, but we just got along. He was a nice person - a character - and we just looked after each other. We saw the benefit of playing well for each other.

“With centre-halves, there needs to be some sort of working chemistry on the pitch to both get along, to be willing to do all the dirty jobs for each other. We used each other's strengths. He was very strong in the air and I maybe glided around him to make sure the rest was covered.”

The pair played key roles as Brentford kept 19 clean sheets and went into the final-day showdown with Reading retaining a chance of securing automatic promotion. A 1-1 draw sent the Royals up, however, and though Coppell’s side reached the play-off final, they were pipped by Stoke. A second straight final defeat in Cardiff hurt.

Ingimarsson says the players were aware of the financial situation at the club at this point in time – for the last few months of the season, he knew it was only a matter of time before he and several others would be on their way.

“I was basically told I was not going to be offered a new contract and the club couldn’t afford it, even if the salary was not that high at the time,” he says.

“I knew that was the case for the last few months of the season. I had an Icelandic agent at the time and you have to have this time to prepare and they have to do their work, but I wasn't thinking much about it.

“I had set myself a target before the season - and I have it written down in a book still - that I was going to go to a higher league, I was going to get a better contract and I was going to be the Player of the Year. I wrote that down, hoping it was going to be with Brentford in a higher league, but that wasn't the case.

“I knew at that time I wanted to test myself because this is the name of the game. You ask players to be their best and if they become their best, that means either your club or the environment you're in goes to a next level or you go.

“I didn't have any other options at Brentford anyway so, when Wolves came for me, I couldn't say no to that.”

Ingimarsson quickly fell out of favour at Molineux and played only 15 games before a loan spell at Brighton and subsequent sale to Reading in October 2003, for a reported fee of £175,000. It marked a healthy profit on a player Wolves had signed on a free little more than a year earlier.

He spent the next eight years in Berkshire, where he is considered a legend, having played 281 times for the Royals, including every one of their 46 league games in the historic Championship title-winning season of 2005/06.

His playing career ended in January 2012 after a short spell at Ipswich – but an exciting new journey was about to begin.

“I moved back to Iceland when I quit playing football and I've been very much involved in the tourist industry for the last 12 years,” he adds.

“After the volcano eruption in Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 - where all the planes were stopped - there was a lot of interest in Iceland.

“I come from east Iceland where very few people live. It’s very remote, as far from the city as you can be. That made opportunities to go into business there, so I opened up a guest house and we had a family business of guest houses.

“Later I started a project to build spa and bathing facilities, similar to the Blue Lagoon in the south. That was a project that took me a long time and it opened in 2019. I'm both shareholder and a board member there, so that's going very well.

“It did exactly what we wanted to do, to boost the economy of the east. We needed some place where people would stop, enjoy and then hopefully spend more money and it worked!”

Ingimarsson, 47, is in Reykjavik now, starting to invest in himself with the hope of a future career in coaching. He is living proof a footballer’s life does not have to end when they have kicked a ball for the last time.

And he knows how pivotal to his future that first move to England was all those years ago.

“I was given a chance at Brentford and that then set me up for my football career, then my football career in England has also set me up in Iceland.

“It has helped me out to invest in stuff I could never have done without football and my career in football, so I will be forever thankful for that.”