My heart goes out to Celtic’s former academy lad Dylan Corr. But he will rise again.

There are a lot of things that put football into perspective. A lot of things that remind you there are more important things going on in the world.

This might not seem like one of those stories that automatically jumps out at you, but I spent a lot of last night thinking about the report about young Dylan Corr, one of our former academy players, who has had to quit the game at just 21.

Almost every single one of us has had a moment where the thing we thought we were going to do with the rest of our lives gets away from us. The exceptions are those fortunate people who spend their whole lives doing exactly what they dreamed about doing. They are amongst the most blessed people on the planet.

I’m almost one of them, but not quite.

What I do now is beyond my wildest dreams in terms of earning a living from something I care about, but it wasn’t what I originally had in mind. I wanted to be a press officer or a media guy for the trade union movement, and I went to university to get a joint degree in Media/Communications and Politics.

Then, during my first year, we went to war in Iraq.

My stomach for the job evaporated almost overnight.

I didn’t want anything to do with frontline politics, not even in a role that sat slightly to one side of it. It was heartbreaking to realise that the reason I had gone there in the first place was no longer something I wanted to pursue.

What I didn’t know was that the next phase of my life was beginning while I was still there; a group of us formed an independent student union website the following year.

Life does that sometimes.

One door doesn’t simply close. Sometimes it slams so hard in your face that you cannot imagine there being another one anywhere nearby … and then it opens for you at a time and a place when you least expected it.

Dylan Corr is only 21.

He has the rest of his life to work out what comes next, and I have little doubt that he has been getting to grips with the situation facing him for some time. But his social media post announcing his retirement at that age was still heartbreaking to read.

He had already made it into professional football. That matters more than he probably knows right now.

Thousands of kids dream about getting that far and never do. To come through Celtic’s academy, sign professional terms and then play senior football means he had already beaten extraordinary odds.

From there, the theory says talent, hard work and opportunity decide how far you go.

But football does not always respect the theory.

Corr has already undergone three operations in four years. Now he requires another knee operation, and he has made the decision that continuing to put his body through this is not worth the long-term risk.

That is dreadfully cruel.

Not because he was guaranteed to become a top player or reach the top level. Nobody gets those guarantees.

But because the opportunity to find out has been taken away from him.

There is a particular cruelty in having done all that work, put in all those hours and made all those sacrifices, only for your body to tell you that the decision is no longer yours.

There will have been plenty of heartbreak between the realisation and the announcement.

And there will be more in the days and weeks ahead.

He will have friends and family around him. He will have people offering encouragement and telling him that there is another life waiting.

All of that matters.

But there is also an uncomfortable truth about moments like this.

Eventually, we go through them alone.

Each of us lives inside a little space that nobody else can fully enter. People can support us, love us and stand beside us, but they cannot process the loss for us.

Corr will have to do that in his own head and in his own time.

And the question, “What do I do with the rest of my life?” is a pretty fucking big question when you are 21 and the answer you had prepared since childhood has suddenly been taken away. There will probably be a period where he simply wants to sit with the anger and frustration. That is perfectly natural.

Then you get back up.

Any footballer who has suffered a serious long-term injury must have contemplated this moment and wondered what they would do if the comeback never came.

I hope Dylan has thought about that.

And I hope somewhere inside him he already knows the answer.

Football was his life and apparently all he ever wanted to do, but every profession is full of people who discovered their true calling only after being turned away from what they thought would define them.

Some of those people eventually became happier than they might ever have been following the original dream.

Even in the darkness, there can be a chink of light.

As much as anything, though, his story is a reminder of the fragile nature of the game we watch. We sometimes get on the backs of footballers who, by our definition, put money first or show insufficient loyalty to a club or fanbase.

Sometimes that criticism is deserved.

But we can also forget that this is their job.

It is something they have devoted their lives to, and fortune does not care about loyalty. The wrong 50-50 challenge can change everything. One awkward landing can do it. One brutal tackle can do it, as John Kennedy discovered when Ionel Ganea shattered his knee and altered the course of his career.

Supporters will send messages. They will wish you well. But they are not going to pay your mortgage when the career ends. And no message of support will repair your knee and put you back on the pitch.

Perhaps we should remember that sometimes when players try to maximise their earning potential while they still can.

They have families, responsibilities and dreams like everybody else, and they know better than most how quickly the whole thing can disappear.

I hope Dylan Corr finds something else he cares about as much as football.

He probably doesn’t believe right now that he will.

I understand that.

But I once had two great loves in my life. I had Labour and the trade union movement, and I had Celtic. I wasn’t able to pursue the dream of working in the sphere of the first. But somehow, unexpectedly, I have lived the dream of working in the sphere of the second.

If Dylan has another great passion somewhere inside him, I hope he follows it with all the vigour and commitment he showed towards football.

Because getting as far as he did required guts, effort and more self-discipline than most of us can imagine. He might not see it clearly today. But those are transferable skills.

And they are very damned valuable ones.

They will help carry him through this and into whatever the next chapter of his life turns out to be, and I wish him nothing but the best of everything.

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