I remember reading Socrates obituary in the Economist Newspaper when he passed away in 2011. He lived an amazing life. Above all else, he was an intelligent man, earning a degree in medicine while playing professional football.
Two weeks ago the media claimed that Chelsea had made a £4m bid for FC Tokyo and Japan international striker, Yoshinori Muto. The interesting thing for me was that the 22 year old has just finished a degree in Economics in the Keio University. This got me thinking about how many professional athletes followed in Socrates ways. For the purpose of this website-which stars have studied Economics?
A quick online search listed plenty of American athletes from American Football, Baseball and Basketball that studied the discipline. These included names such as John Elway (Stanford), Merlin Olson (Utah State), Mike Mussina (Stanford) and Jeremy Lin (Harvard). The most high profile name was Tiger Woods (Stanford). Given the prestige of college sports in America there was far more elite performers that studied Economics. From an Irish perspective many of our recent international Rugby players have studied Economics. These include Ronan O Gara (UCC), Rob Kearney (UCD) and Gordon D'arcy (UCD).
Below is a list of famous names from soccer I found online that studied or majored in Economics. Hopefully I haven't missed anyone - unfortunately, I couldn't locate the institutions for Oleguer and De Jong .