Hadia those who said Reece Wabara was set to be the next great right-back for Manchester City. Recruiters loved him, fans knew his name, and the richest club in England had him in their ranks as one of the most promising young talents from the academy. Today, at 32 years old, Wabara is not playing professional football. Instead, he earns around £35 million a year with a fashion brand that has its own store on Oxford Street in London. The story of how he got here is one of the most fascinating tales produced by English football in recent years, marked by candid complacency, bold choices, romances with television stars, and a business transformation that no one anticipated.
Wabara’s career at Manchester City amounted to a single appearance on the final day of the 2010/11 season. What followed was a series of loans to Ipswich Town, Oldham Athletic, Blackpool, and Doncaster Rovers, before the club ultimately released him in 2014. The defender also went on to play for Barnsley, Wigan, and Bolton before hanging up his boots in 2017, having never managed to live up to the expectations that surrounded him as a teenager.
And he knows exactly why. Wabara’s self-criticism is brutally honest, without excuses or evasions. “It’s my fault, I was complacent, I didn’t push myself hard enough,” he stated in an interview with CEOCAST in December 2022, cutting short any illusion that circumstances were more to blame than he himself was. “Until I was 18, it was too easy; then everyone started to catch up with me. I was the best player. You’re a kid, you don’t have that awareness. When it’s easy, and you only realize it was easy in retrospect, you don’t push yourself to the maximum. Everyone told me how good I was going to be, that I was going to play for England, that I was going to be the next right-back for Manchester City. And I wasn’t good enough, and everyone caught up with me. I had some loan spells, I didn’t deliver, and you know your time is up. Now I’m very paranoid because it just takes one year and you’re out, one big mistake and you’re out of the game.”
But while his football career was slowing down, Wabara was already building something else alongside it. The fashion brand Maniere de Voir was born during his years as a professional player, and it was precisely this entrepreneurial ambition that ultimately cost him his last opportunity to stay with a top-tier team. He was at Wigan, had just been promoted with the club, and was included in the league’s team of the year when the management called him in for a conversation that marked him forever. “I was playing at Wigan, we got promoted, and I was in the team of the year,” he recalled. “A member of the management said that I had been fantastic, but they thought I was focusing too much on the business. I realized I was playing a political game, at that moment, when I started to feel the shift… I thought to myself that I couldn’t have my future in someone else’s hands. I had the business, and that was my way of taking a stand. At that moment I thought: ‘you know what, that’s enough.'”
The decision to leave football was not made in a moment of anger. It was calculated, rational, and, looking at what happened afterwards, visionary. “I decided to stop completely because the business was going very well and focus is important,” he explained to the same podcast. “I was 25 or 26 years old and I had to make a choice: what is more sustainable in the long term? Where can I be the best of the best? And unfortunately, at the time, I could have played in the Premier League, but being a Champions League-winning footballer or a World Cup champion had a very low percentage. I had to make the logical choice, which was to continue with the business and take it as far as possible.”
The lesson he takes from that period is one of those that self-help books try to explain and rarely succeed: “People saw me as someone vain, not dedicated, focused on the business. When I launched the clothing brand, people said I just wanted to have a brand. They didn’t understand that all of that was simply my way of being as a human being. I crossed paths with former coaches and they say they saw that in me and that I was misunderstood. When I started to prove my worth, it was already too late; the reputation had already been established. You have to be exceptional from the start; it’s very difficult to fall and rise again. It’s the same in football. You don’t see people who are talked about as the next big name fall and then actually become that big name.”
There is no regret, but there is awareness. On the High Performance Podcast, Wabara was even more direct about what he lost and what he gained from the experience of failure. “I’m glad I missed the opportunity with Manchester City, the English national team, of being highly regarded. I was too complacent, that’s the crux of the matter. I’ve always worked hard, but I could have done more. It’s not regret because I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t gone through that. But if I could live my life again, I would be playing in the Champions League or in the Premier League now.” And when asked directly if he would have reached the highest level had he made different choices, the answer left no room for interpretation: “One hundred percent, without a shadow of a doubt. But it didn’t happen that way, and that’s one of those things. At the same time, if I hadn’t had that failure or that slight regret, I wouldn’t have been able to achieve what I have now.”
Alongside this footballing and business story, two names emerge that few expected to be associated with Reece Wabara. During his formative years at Manchester City, the full-back dated two actresses from the famous British soap opera Coronation Street. Helen Flanagan was the first to speak about the matter in her memoirs titled Head and Heart: Break-ups, Breakdowns and Being Rosie. “I went out a few times with a player from Manchester City named Reece Wabara who, and this is too funny, ended up dating Brooke Vincent, my colleague on Coronation Street, afterwards. We were never anything serious and I didn’t sleep with him, but there was one night when he took me to the house where he was staying after we went out in Manchester and the furious landlady kicked me out. ‘You are not going up those stairs, young lady,’ she said. Hilarious!” Flanagan also added: “Reece was gorgeous, but it ended as quickly as it started, and I think he was a bit of a womanizer. In fact, he has had a very successful career outside of football with his clothing brand Maniere De Voir, which has a flagship store on Oxford Street in London, so he has come a long way since the landlady scolded him for bringing girls home.”
The same Wabara who was put out by an angry landlord in Manchester now has an emblematic store on one of the most famous shopping streets in the world. Maniere de Voir opened its doors on Oxford Street in 2023 and generates around £35 million annually. For a player who never made it to the Premier League, it is probably the most valuable title he has ever won. And this time, there was no complacency to take it away from him.
This article first appeared on Apito Final.
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