As Luke Matheson takes a seat in the same Manchester cafe where we met six months ago, and I think about how difficult this conversation is going to be at times, my mind goes back to an answer he gave at the end of our interview in August.
Football, Matheson had come to realise, isn’t the be-all and end-all.
“What the 17-year-old me might have viewed as success isn’t what the 22-year-old me views as success,” Matheson said a month after signing for non-League Macclesfield, who play in the National League North, in English football’s sixth tier.
“I feel like I was so involved in football that it almost defined who I was when I was 17 or 18. Whereas now, it’s a massive part of who I am, but it doesn’t define what I am.
“Success for me isn’t getting back to the EFL (English Football League). Yes, that’s what I want to do and that’s what I’m going to strive to do. Hopefully, it’s with Macclesfield and we go all the way. But it’s not the case that I’ve failed as a footballer if I don’t get back to that.
“Success for me might be becoming a father. I want to make an impact in the Macclesfield community. I want to set up a charity. I have all these things I want to do outside of football, so it’s not a case of in five, 10 years, I have this concrete plan and if it doesn’t come to fruition, I’ve failed.”
Growing up fast around the chaotic world of professional football and experiencing some wild highs and lows along the way has helped shape that sense of perspective.
At the age of 15, Matheson was playing for Rochdale in League One, competing on the same pitch as men but not old enough to get changed in the same dressing room. The following season, he was scoring against Manchester United at Old Trafford one minute and getting the bus to school the next. Four months later, he joined Wolverhampton Wanderers in a deal worth £1million. Aged 17, Matheson was an England Under-18 international and “living the dream”.
(Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
But then it started to unravel.
Lost in that strange hinterland of under-23 football and not helped by serious injuries, Matheson’s career stalled at Wolves. In between loan spells at Rochdale, Ipswich Town, Scunthorpe United, and in Scotland with Hamilton Academical, he rarely got close to the Wolves first team and was released in the summer of 2023 without making a senior appearance for the club.
“It was tough because I was a kid – I passed my driving test the day before I joined Wolves,” Matheson says, recalling how his dad had to drive his car to Wolverhampton when he signed because he didn’t feel ready to go on the motorway.
“Yes, things didn’t work out. I had a lot of injuries – I tore my hamstring off the bone, I did my LCL (lateral collateral ligament on the outside of the knee), two of my three-and-a-bit seasons there, I had season-ending injuries. Did I perform at the level I wanted to? Probably not.”
Measured and erudite, there is no trace of bitterness or anger in Matheson’s voice when he reflects on that chapter of his career. But there is confusion — confusion as to why Wolves signed him in the first place. “You do think, was this… not a punt, but was it thought through?”
At times, Matheson tied himself in knots thinking about how he had traded first-team football in League One for being an under-23 player in the Premier League.
“That was a really weird dynamic for me to wrap my head around because, on the one hand, you’re the one who’s played the most professional games, and on the other hand, you’re the newcomer and a kid who’s never experienced this (under-23 football), so are you actually better than anyone here?
“It’s like a constant internal battle of what is actually true, and it has this negative effect on you where it can spiral into this confidence issue, like imposter syndrome: ‘Do I actually belong here?’.”
(Jack Thomas – WWFC/Wolves via Getty Images)
In August, we sat down to discuss all of that and more, only for Matheson to suffer a bad hamstring injury a few days later while playing for Macclesfield, sidelining him for three months and prompting us to agree to revisit the interview when he was back playing.
Matheson returned against South Shields in the FA Trophy (the non-League equivalent of the FA Cup) in December. His next game, away at Bedford Town in the league three days later, turned into a harrowing experience.
It was December 16, a Tuesday night, and the Macclesfield team bus was making the 150-mile trip back from Bedford to the north west after a 2-1 victory. The traffic on the M1 motorway had come to a total standstill.
“Everyone’s checking updates (on their phones), they’re saying it’s going to be at least four o’clock in the morning until we’re moving,” Matheson says. “It gets to four, then it just keeps going up. We have absolutely no idea what’s gone on. We just assume it’s something serious.
“When we drive past (the accident), it’s five o’clock, everyone’s delirious, knackered, people are sleeping. The coach is having to weave in and out of cars because people have dropped off – they’d been there that long.”
Matheson remembers getting a tap on the shoulder. “Someone woke me and said, ‘What car does Ethan drive?’. I said, ‘A white Mercedes. Why?’. And they said, ‘That was like that car there (in the accident)’. After that conversation, people were texting him, saying: ‘Can you just let us know you got home safe?’.
“But you’re not expecting a reply because it’s five o’clock in the morning and you assume that he has (got home). Also, how many white Mercedes are there? You think it’s just a coincidence, so it’s not even crossing your mind (something has happened).”
Ethan is Ethan McLeod, a 21-year-old forward who had joined Macclesfield in the summer and been on the substitutes’ bench alongside Matheson the night before. McLeod had decided to make his own way to and from Bedford that day because he lived in the Midlands.
Matheson eventually got back to his home in Manchester sometime after 7am. An hour or so later, the Macclesfield manager, John Rooney, telephoned him. Matheson assumed Rooney wanted to talk about the game.
The words that followed were impossible to process.
McLeod had died in an accident on the M1 at 10.40pm.
“I was kind of numb to it at first,” Matheson says.
“We all got together at the club later that day, about three or four o’clock, and it was one of the most emotional days of my life. Everyone was in tears.”
Matheson had known McLeod longer than most. They were at Wolves together, playing in different age groups but doing rehabilitation at the same time after both suffered hamstring injuries. It was a similar story at Macclesfield, where they spent long hours in the gym recovering from injuries again.
The message that Matheson posted on social media 48 hours after McLeod’s death, accompanied by a photo of the two of them returning to the pitch the previous Saturday, was heartfelt and moving.
“I sat there trying to type the perfect message for him, deleting things, rewording it,” Matheson says, his voice filled with sadness.
“Ethan was one of the most genuine, incredible human beings you’ll ever meet.”
Ethan mate where to begin. We had the pleasure of getting to know each over the years and unfortunately for us a lot of our time together was spent rehabbing in the gym. During that time I got to know a lot about the type of person you were away from the pitch. You were someone… pic.twitter.com/M1RknLAm5l
— Luke Matheson (@Luke_Matheson41) December 18, 2025
When Matheson was studying for his A-Levels while playing for Rochdale, he spent so long in the library with his mates that they became best friends with the janitor and the cleaning staff.
It’s a story that goes some way to explaining why it was no surprise last September to see Matheson among the first cohort to graduate from the new business school set up by the Professional Footballers Association (PFA). Aged 22, Matheson completed a diploma in sport directorship.
Other students included Phil Jones, the former Manchester United defender, the ex-Newcastle goalkeeper Tim Krul, and Juan Pablo Angel, who was scoring goals for Aston Villa before Matheson was born.
Education has always been important to Matheson, but the impetus to enrol on a course that would typically be of interest to much older players came after suffering a serious injury in his last season at Wolves.
Initially, Matheson was told he had a grade 2a hamstring injury, which is a partial tear, and that he would be out for six weeks. In his first game back, he complained of tightness, leading to another MRI scan. Matheson remembers being called into an office the following day.
“One of the physios sat me down, showed me the report, and said, ‘We call it a 4c, which on the grade scale is as bad as it gets. You’ve got a tear in your semimembranosus tendon. We’re booking a consultation for the surgery’.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God. What the hell has happened here?’.
“We set up the consultation with the surgeon, he assessed the images and said, ‘You don’t have to have this surgery. But my professional recommendation is, if you don’t, you’ll never play at the level you want to play at ever again’.
“The Zoom call ended and I just broke down in tears.”
Aside from the frustration that Matheson felt about the earlier diagnosis, the surgeon’s words served as a reminder about the precariousness of professional football. When a PFA representative visited Wolves shortly afterwards to discuss the sport directorship course with the players, Matheson jumped at it.
“I thought, ‘Why not do it and start preparing now rather than when I’m 32 and thinking of retiring?’,” says Matheson, who did his studying after signing for Bolton Wanderers, in League One, in 2023.
(Dave Howarth – CameraSport via Getty Images)
“My mum and dad are big on education, so they pushed me to do my A-Levels. I couldn’t go away with England (under-17s) if I hadn’t done my GCSE work, so that got instilled into me from a young age.
“I might never use the sport directorship. But if I ever do need it, I’ve got it, and I’ve also got another 15 years to improve myself.”
Matheson goes on to tell a story with a smile about how everyone on the course was divided into groups of four or five people and asked to study a particular club.
“In our case, it was Crystal Palace, funnily enough,” he adds. “I spent two years looking at all the ins and outs of Palace — I could even tell you how much they made from selling Coke at the stadium.”
He can also tell you how it felt to knock them out of the FA Cup.
There were 117 league places separating Crystal Palace, the FA Cup holders, and Macclesfield, a phoenix club that was playing in the ninth tier of English football in 2021. On paper, their meeting in the FA Cup third round last month was a total mismatch. On the pitch, it was anything but.
“You could feel something that day, something you can’t really put into words,” Matheson says. “You had that genuine feeling of, ‘Why not?’. And you just know that came from Ethan, that he was looking down. He was part of that day, without a doubt.”
McLeod’s parents were at the game and in the changing room afterwards, celebrating a famous 2-1 victory with the players. Matheson, who came on with 11 minutes of normal time remaining, remembers seeing McLeod’s mum by the edge of the pitch at the final whistle.
“I gave her a hug and we were just there for what felt like an eternity,” he says. “I’m trying not to cry because I don’t want her to start crying. Then one of us starts crying and we’re both bawling.”
There were some fantastic stories in the days that followed, including the Macclesfield defender Sam Heathcote returning to Stamford Park Primary School in Altrincham, where he is a PE teacher, to a rapturous reception from the pupils.
“A few of us went to his school and played a little game against the kids. That was really fun,” Matheson says. “He’s a hero to all of them.”
Matheson’s a hero, too, in the eyes of Macclesfield’s under-8s — a team that he coaches a couple of times a week as part of his work in the club’s academy.
“They’re all superstars!” he says, his face beaming as he recalls the card they gave him after the Palace victory.
“I’d like to be that coach that they remember. Even if it’s just one of them who feels like that, then I’ve done my job.”
It’s not just memories that the Macclesfield players will always have of that magical day against Palace — they’ve each got a little memento, too.
“We’ve got this FA Cup ball that’s got little tints of gold on it because Palace were the holders and supposed to play with that throughout their run in the FA Cup,” Matheson explains. “So we’ve all got one sat at home because they’ll never be used again.”
Although Matheson hasn’t ruled out a repeat performance against Brentford on Monday in the next round, there’s a much bigger picture.
“I think our goal now is to get to the play-offs to put ourselves in with a chance of getting promoted,” he says. “But, personally for me, it’s just living on with Ethan’s legacy and that means being out on that pitch.”