Luke Sutton is a Full Contact Advisor and Commercial Manager, who is available to all our sporting clients to provide advice on their careers and how to maximise their commercial opportunities.
Why Luke?
Few cricketers have worked harder on and off the field than the English wicket-keeper/batsman Luke Sutton.
During a career spanning fourteen years he twice captained Derbyshire and when scoring 151 against Yorkshire, became the highest scoring wicket-keeper in a Roses match. On hanging up his gloves he had scored nearly 7,500 first class runs, including eleven centuries, and captured nearly 500 dismissals. He also proved to be an innovative and inspirational captain. In every sense, an all-rounder.
During his playing career he played alongside the likes of Andrew Flintoff, James Anderson and Muttiah Muralitharan.
In the middle of his playing career Luke started to develop business interests, driven by his acknowledgement that life existed away from the cricket field and that a professional sporting career is only very short.
Yet it has not all been sun and roses. In 2004 he experienced the tragic death of his girlfriend at the time. He was also open enough to admit to treatment for depression when he retired from the game in 2011.
In retiring, Luke said: “I have been aware for some time that I have problems with certain aspects of my mental health. I have always pushed myself to the limit but I reached a point that it was having an adverse effect on my relationships with my family and colleagues, and my health in general. Although as a professional sportsman it is extremely embarrassing to admit to a weakness, I’m proud to have found the strength of character to seek treatment, enabling me now to feel extremely positive about my future.”
That future revolves around helping sports people make the most of their abilities and assets. Luke, in joining the Full Contact stable, is already the Managing Partner at Activate Sport Management, an organisation that includes the England cricketer James Anderson as a client. He is able to combine a good brain (a degree from Durham in Economics) with a fine sporting track record and also, and perhaps most fundamentally, an understanding of the difficulties and stresses that even the most happy-go-lucky sports people sometimes endure.
It is his primary aim to offer a holistic service to his clients, very different from the traditional ‘Mr Ten Per Center’. This ambition chimes perfectly with the Full Contact promise to offer a comprehensive professional service for a sporting professional’s needs. To treat professionals as professionals and offer balanced, objective and impartial support and advice.
