He scored a goal in the A-League grand final, helping the Central Coast Mariners to take the national title. And guess what? He’s also a mortgage broker with AFG. Daniel McBreen tells MPA his incredible story.
Central Coast Mariners striker Daniel McBreen is flying high as one of the lynchpins behind his team’s A-League success. But life must go on after football and he has been busily taking strides towards following in his father’s footsteps and taking on the family business – an AFG-backed mortgage brokerage. Tragically, his father was struck down with cancer last year, but McBreen is determined to carry on with his father’s legacy while seeing out his footballing career. He talks to MPA about life, sport, family and broking.
Q: How did you get into mortgage broking?
A: It’s quite simple really. My old man was a mortgage broker in his day and over time it was sort of unspoken that I’d take over from him one day. So I started to do my studies and eventually I got my qualifications and, unfortunately for me, dad passed away last year – he got ill with cancer – so it brought on taking over the business a bit quicker than we expected. But getting into the mortgage business was through dad really. I’d always been around him working, and had a bit of an interest in it, and that’s the way it went.
Q: Have you taken on his client book?
A: His partner has got his clients, and I’m going to go through and take on his book and make sure that they’re alright, and go from there.
Q: How do you divide your time between football and mortgage broking?
A: At the moment, football takes priority. Obviously, it’s my full-time profession, and takes a lot of my time. But it’s a good profession where – although I’m away a lot – we do train at home and it still gives me the afternoons free. So I generally spend the mornings up until lunchtime training with the team and then after that, if I’ve got business to do, I’ll go into the office and work in the afternoons. But at the moment, between the two, football takes priority. But I’ve got plenty of spare time, and I’ve got the evenings free as well, so mortgage broking is quite a handy job to do when you’ve got another one [football] to do as well. I think a big problem for me is time management at the moment. It's about trying to find a time to go and see clients, or do that extra study that needs to be done. You need to become pretty adept at time management.
Q: Are there any lessons or skills that you can take from your football career into mortgage broking?
A: I think it’s just like any job or profession you’re in. You just need to work hard to get to the top, and to be successful, and that’s what I’m trying to do. Every spare moment I get away from football – and I’ve got two young kids as well that take up a lot of time – I try and put towards doing what I need to do to get this [business] up and running. I’m hoping to play football for another couple of years and if that comes off I’d like the mortgage side of the business to be up and running – and to be in a position where, when I do finish playing football, I can move seamlessly into full-time [broking] work and have the work there to keep me going on strong.
Q: Do you think your profile as a footballer for the Mariners will help with building up your mortgage broking business?
A: I hope so. I get a lot of people telling me to try and work off of this, and I have been – and will do so even more as I get further into it. It helps in any business to try and use the profile that you have to get out and see a broader audience. So any contacts that I’ve made by playing football I’m definitely going to try to use to get me ahead in the mortgage side of things.
Photo: John Dewberry
