American dream has come true for Sullivan

Sullivan, from Lancing, played for his boyhood team Brighton & Hove Albion before spells at seven other clubs. It was a move to Portsmouth in 2013 and a subsequent loan spell at Cambridge which saw the now 27-year-old fall out of love with the game he had played all his life.

When Pompey paid up his contract a year early in the summer of 2014, Sullivan, then 26, a regular visitor to America on holidays, made the decision to move to Las Vegas. He has worked in real estate for The Craig Tann Group in Nevada since September, selling houses worth $56,000 up to $510,000.

His job is commission-based only but the former goalkeeper has sold 11 houses in just five months.

Sullivan admits some of his friends find it crazy that he has turned his back on a career in football, especially as he is now working 13-plus hours a day and getting up at 4.15am.

However, he said: “To anyone else it’s crazy. I’ll go home now and people will say ‘why did you quit, you had the best job in the world?’ But I probably fell out of love with the game slightly and I thought it was the right time to do something else.

“There’s a lot of similarities between football and this job, in the sense that you have to push yourself every day – and I’m self employed, which is similar to when I was playing football.

“At the end of the day, there were so many players with a similar ability to me out on the market, who were free transfers. I still have confidence now that I could play at a good level but I just felt it was the right time to leave that career.

“That was my biggest fear, leaving football. But the only thing I can see myself doing now is this career in real estate for the rest of my life, without a shadow of a doubt.

“There’s lots of things I’ve learned in this job and I’ve set high standards as there’s so many opportunities here to grow. I’m working hard to try to build a business and a career for myself.”

Sullivan played 17 times for Brighton after playing youth football for Thistle Youth and Lancing Rangers.

His Albion debut, a 3-2 win over high-flying Leicester in League One in 2008, was a highlight. He said: “I was behind Michel Kuipers who, as a big Brighton fan, I watched on the terraces. I remember in the morning we trained and he said he wasn’t fit.

“We went 2-0 down and I should have given away a penalty. That would have been 3-0 and it could have been my last game for Brighton, my one and only. But we ended up turning it around and we
won 3-2.”

His only regret in football was that he was not at Albion longer. He said: “It’s not that I’m bitter about it but I just felt my time at Brighton was cut short. I think a lot of us in that team, the local lads, were a bit hard done by.

“I played 17 games for Brighton so I look back with good memories, but I feel like I could have played a bit more and was a bit unlucky. I felt like it was a club I could have spent my whole career at.”