Ex-England star swaps millionaires row for return to community rugby

Ben Foden has given up his job in real estate, leasing high-end properties in downtown New York, to return to England and to coach the sport he loves.

Now sporting a thick and greying beard rather than the cleancut, boy band looks of his 34-cap England career, which attracted a fair few headlines off the pitch as well as on it due to his marraige and subsequent break-up with Saturdays singer Una Healy, Foden is happy mucking in as coach of grassroots Yorkshire club, Scarborough RUFC.

Foden, who turned 40 in July, had been looking to get back into rugby for a while, having spent a few years trying something new in a cut-throat world that ultimately felt alien to the brutal honesty of a rugby changing room.

He’d decided to suit up and work in property after retiring from rugby in 2022, having spent the latter years of a stellar career, which started at Sale and blossomed at Northampton, playing in Major League Rugby in the States.

Having narrowly missed out on landing a job as head of rugby at famous public school, Sedburgh, which includes ex-England captains Will Carling and Lawrence Dallaglio amongst its alumni, Foden took a phone call from the headmaster of Scarborough College, who were looking to replicate the success they’ve enjoyed in other sports in rugby.

Foden accepted the job offer and now has a dual-role, heading up the College’s rugby programme, while also coaching of the coastal town’s rugby club.

“I’d kept my foot in the water in America, doing a bit of coaching with the universities, and I’d always enjoyed doing that far more than any other job that I was doing,” he said.

“Now I’m surrounded by rugby again, I’ve got a load of new mates from the club, and to come back and make a career out of it is a bit of a dream.”

Foden won two Premiership titles during his career, in 2006 with Sale and then in 2014 with Saints.

The one major regret he has is England’s exit at the quarter-final stage of the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

“As a squad, the whole tour didn’t really go as planned, and the fact that we lost to France, who we’d dominated in the previous Six Nations,” he told Rugby Journal.

“They were in a mess, they’d just lost to Tonga and crawled out of their group, and if we’d have beaten them, we’d have faced a Welsh team that we’d beaten twice in the warm-up games, and we’d have been very confident of beating them again.  And then we’d have been in a final and you never know.

“I look back in disappointment in terms of how we acted as a squad, not recognising what a great opportunity we had there.

“It could have been a turning point for our lives. You see the guys who won the World Cup in 2003 and you know, they’ve been living off that for a while now.”