Connor Hammell will be 24 next month and would, in a perfect world, be preparing for his latest season in professional football. He would be a young player with a first-team appearance tally in three figures; another gifted Cumbrian making his mark on the sport.

Life, and football, does not always follow the path expected and for the last three years Hammell has been working as a roofer. “After I left Carlisle I just decided I wanted some sort of security,” he says. “It’s hard work, but I enjoy it. I work with my friends, so that’s a bonus.”

It has taken Hammell a long time to feel settled with this new life and he admits there are still times he struggles to see past his regrets. For every home-grown player who makes the grade there are many more who come out of the full-time game with a more complex and challenging set of feelings.

These are the lesser-told stories from the sport’s more brutal side. Hammell wanted to talk about how he has felt these past few years because he feels others will identify with the sense that the game, for all its glitter, can also take a harsh toll. “It’s not a topic many people get to hear about,” he says, “but it does affect people’s lives. It’s definitely affected mine.”

Hammell says he found it difficult to come to terms with the way his time at Carlisle ended and how he suddenly had to confront a future far from the one imagined. He had made his first-team debut at 18 – “the best feeling ever” – and, until his first season as a pro, had every reason to think he would follow other talented boys from his home county into a long and fruitful career.

This had been his idea ever since he overcame initial rejection to force his way through United’s youth system. “After a six-week trial when I was nine, I got told I wasn’t good enough,” he says. “At that age you think the world’s ended. But I went back to my local club, Cockermouth, and Carlisle soon came back and told me they’d made a mistake.

“That kind of fuelled me from a young age. I was always very determined. I ended up being pretty much the only one to get through each year, and I eventually got through to youth team level.”

Hammell, a bright attacking midfielder, admits his ambition with United gave him a “tunnel vision” that was to the detriment of his approach to school work – but his focus seemed vindicated when, whilst still in United’s under-18 ranks, he stepped up to the first team.

On December 20, 2014, he was named on the bench by manager Keith Curle for a League Two game against Northampton. With 11 minutes remaining, Curle called for Hammell. “He was shouting to me at the sideline. I was just in my own world, not thinking I was going to get on…”

After Carlisle’s 2-1 victory, Hammell says he received praise from Curle, youth boss Alan Moore and senior players along the lines of it being one of the best debuts they had seen for some time. “I’m not one to big myself up,” he says. “But that’s what they were saying.”

He played twice more before the end of that season, which saw United scrapping for survival. “He [Curle] brought me on at half-time against York and I played five different positions in 45 minutes. That was the first time I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’

“I then came on in the last game against Hartlepool and, after that, I expected to push on from the next pre-season. He [Curle] said he was looking forward to having me back with the team. I had a vision I would play for Carlisle and do really well. I’d seen my peers like Kyle Dempsey and Patrick Brough come through; I wanted to be like them and thought I was gonna be like them.

“It just wasn’t the case.”

Hammell was upgraded to professional terms but, he says, the environment the following summer was “completely different”. A number of experienced players joined Carlisle as Curle sought to make the squad more robust. Younger players like Hammell increasingly felt they were at the fringes.

“It was as if I wasn’t even being acknowledged,” he says. “I came on in one pre-season game for 15 minutes at left-back, which wasn’t a position I’d ever played. He [Curle] actually told me halfway through my season as a first-year pro that a decision had been made on me in that game.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. From then onwards I just lost the enjoyment. It got drained out of me. There were a few of us, even some senior players, not getting a look-in. If you’ve been in football all your life, and someone doesn’t pay attention to you at the time when it matters, it can be very soul-destroying. That year kind of did it for me.”

Hammell barely figured in the first-team picture in 2015/16 and, that spring, he left the club. Officially this was by “mutual consent” but the sudden departure still tormented Hammell. “That was one of the hardest days I’ve ever had,” he says. “Knowing that something’s been a part of your life for so long, but isn’t going to be your path any more, is devastating.”

Hammell says he “couldn’t speak more highly” of Moore and fellow youth coach Vince Overson during his time at the club, but, give or take a few texts, his phone was quiet in those hollow early weeks out of the professional game.

“When you leave, coaches you’ve grown up with…you don’t hear from them,” he says. “They don’t text you, don’t contact you. I had an agent, but that was pretty similar – they only want to know you when you’re doing well. As soon as I left Carlisle I lost communication with [him].

“All the support you’ve had over the years, you feel it was for nothing. And because I’d never experienced playing anywhere else, I didn’t know who to contact, where to go. I was kind of on my own.”

Hammell went to play for Workington Reds, and then lined up an opportunity in Australia which he had to curtail almost immediately because of a family matter. None of these things replaced the reality of being in the professional game and he admits this was the point he started suffering mentally.

“At the time I left, I didn’t really process it. It was the year later that it really hit me. I’d left Carlisle, had a summer to myself, spent time with my friends like a normal teenager would, and then…‘what do I do now?’ That’s when I really struggled.

“It’s hard to describe. I was in a low way and my confidence in myself was totally shattered. It even got to the point where I’d not be very confident in things outside of football. When you go from being one of the main guys, in how you see yourself, to such a low place, you have a totally different opinion of yourself. You think you’re not good enough.

“It had started affecting my football when I was at Workington Reds too. I didn’t want to let myself down and let other people down. I could feel it coming, could feel myself playing worse and worse each game. So in the end I just took some time away from it.”

Hammell said this was the period when he could have done with a footballing mentor, or access to a better system of support. Without either, he turned to his family. “I’m very close to my granda. He’s very humble and he tried to give me a talking-to. He sort of brought me round from it. If I didn’t have my family I don’t know how I’d have got through that period of my life.”

Hammell says he found it hard seeing his family upset by his struggles and in one sense was relieved when a completely different path was presented. “One of my best mates offered me a job and I said I’d give it a go," he says. He took roofing qualifications and tried to adapt to the change. “I’m one of those people who, if I do something over and over, I become quite good at it. Luckily I managed to pick it up quite easily.

“It is nice doing something different and I think I enjoy it more because I’m with my friends. But it took a good year to get used to it because it was a really strange adjustment – and, if I’m honest, making that decision to not play football any more still affects me now. There are days when I think, ‘What if I’d just stuck at it and gone somewhere else?' You live with a lot of regret.”

Hammell eventually returned to amateur football at clubs such as Whitehaven and, currently, Workington Athletic. “I play with a couple of lads I know. They’re a decent team and we play on a decent surface at Lakes College. It suits my game and I’m getting my enjoyment back, building my confidence up again.”

These are gradual steps back into a game that, only a few years ago, had seemed to be offering all its delights to Hammell. He sees Carlisle giving more opportunities to young Cumbrian players now and cannot help reflecting on the way a boy’s future can be so differently shaped based on the whims of a particular coach or regime.

“It is nice to see there are a lot more young lads getting a chance now,” he says. “I do think lads who’ve been at the club, even the ones who’ve just done a two-year scholarship there, deserve a chance. They are there for a reason. They should get a look-in. It shouldn’t all depend on what the first-team are doing.

“When I was there, there wasn’t even a reserve team, really. In my pro year, training was all I did. When you come to the end, and haven’t played football for a year, you’ve lost that sharpness and it isn’t very good for anyone.

“I also do think there should be some sort of support system after football. At the end of the day, these are lads’ lives. It’s not a game, is it?”

Hammell does not rule out trying to push on with football again, perhaps in the semi-professional game. But he also values the security of his job and the time he can now spend with his family and friends; time a football career tends to take away.

He will always know that he did make the professional grade, even if it was brief and not anything like as gratifying or sustained as he thought it would be. “My granda’s got my shirt framed from my debut,” he says. “That memory, and the other shirts I’ve kept, are things I’ll keep with me forever. I’ll never not look back.

“Life’s a lot different now. I’m dealing with it better and have processed it a lot more. But there will still be that thing where I think, ‘What if?’”