Professional Athlete CV Examples & Writing Guide

This is the version you send to clubs, coaches and agents. It leads with position, level and measurables, and the film link sits in the contact line. The name and clubs are invented; the appearance counts and minutes are the kind of figures you can pull from a league site or your own match log.

Athletes lose interviews by sending the wrong one. A club's technical director and a corporate hiring manager are reading for opposite things.

• Level and minutes. Not the club name alone. Twenty starts in a lower division says more than a bench year in a higher one.
• Availability. Games missed through injury, current contract status, work permit or registration eligibility, and whether you are free to sign now.
• Film that opens instantly. A phone-friendly link with your number and shirt colour labelled, cut to your position, and 3 to 5 minutes long.
• Measurables with a date on them. Speed, jump, lift numbers and testing results go stale, and coaches assume the worst if there is no year.
• Character signals in the small print: captaincy, community appearances, coaching licences, discipline record.

“Send me minutes, not adjectives. Appearances, starts, minutes, level, and a film link that works on my phone in the car park. Then tell me your contract status in the first line, because half the profiles I get are from players who cannot actually sign.”

• Give raw counts and rate stats together: appearances and minutes, then the per-90 or per-game number. One without the other is easy to dismiss.
• Use the units your sport uses. Football: appearances, minutes, goals, assists, duels. Rugby: appearances, minutes, tries, tackles, carries. Cricket: innings, runs, batting average, strike rate, wickets, economy. Basketball: minutes, points, rebounds, assists per game, shooting splits.
• Date every testing number and say where it was measured (pre-season testing, a trial, a showcase).
• Label the film: 'full-match link plus a 4-minute defensive cut, white kit, number 5'.
• List honours precisely: league team of the week, team of the season selections, international camps and caps, play-off appearances.
• You do not have to publish an injury history on a CV. Availability, such as 'missed 4 matches through injury across 3 seasons', is fair and useful; a medical record is your own business and a club will ask directly at the medical stage.

Write it as employment, because that is what it was. You had an employer, a contract, a schedule, performance reviews and public accountability. The mistake is to leave a five-year hole and hope nobody asks.

1. 1Use a job title a reader outside sport understands: 'Professional Footballer (EFL League Two)' with the club as the employer and the contract dates.
2. 2Explain the level in one short line, such as 'fourth-tier professional league, 46-game season, 28-player squad'. Most hiring managers do not know the divisions.
3. 3Translate the work: training hours a week, travel weeks a year, media obligations, sponsor commitments, community appearances, leadership of a squad or unit.
4. 4Add anything with money attached: personal sponsorship deals you negotiated, camps you ran and their revenue, a business you built in the off-season.
5. 5Include off-season and parallel work honestly, including your degree if you completed it while playing. Employers respect the double load once they see it written down.
6. 6Do not lead with grit and teamwork adjectives. Show the schedule and the numbers, and let the reader draw the conclusion.

Sixth formers searching for an athlete CV usually want a recruiting profile to email to US college coaches or a UK university sports scholarship programme. It looks different from both documents above and it has to be short enough to read on a phone between training sessions.

• Top block: name, the year you finish school, position, height and weight, school or college and club, town, plus your and your parent's contact details.
• Academics next: GCSE results, predicted A-level or BTEC grades and the course you want to study, plus an SAT score for US colleges if you have one. Coaches screen on academic eligibility before they watch anything.
• Athletic numbers with dates: testing results, event times, showcase measurements, and season statistics for the last two years.
• Film link, labelled with your shirt number and colour. Keep it under 4 minutes and put your best play first.
• Team and coach references with contact permission, including your club coach and school or college coach.
• Honours, camps and trials attended, and for US colleges your registration status with the NCAA Eligibility Center (or the equivalent for your division). Check the current rules, because they change.
• Keep it to one page and email it as a PDF with a subject line naming your position, the year you finish school and one key number.

• One page for both versions. A club scouts on film and a hiring manager reads for 20 seconds.
• Plain PDF, single column. Sports organisations use the same applicant tracking software as everyone else, so avoid image-only layouts and heavy graphics on the job version.
• No photo and no date of birth on a UK job CV. A playing profile does carry your height, weight and birth year, because eligibility and squad rules depend on them.
• Name your file clearly: lastname-position-2026.pdf for playing, lastname-cv.pdf for work.
• Keep contract or eligibility status in the first three lines of a playing profile. It is the first question anyone will ask.
• For the job version, translate every sport term. If a sentence needs a fan to understand it, rewrite it.