Pro Football Hall of Famer Joe Thomas retired from the Browns in 2018 after a brilliant 11-year career. However, he still wanted to stay close to the game, which is a feeling many of us have shared over the years.
There was only one major obstacle.
“When I stopped playing, my wife Annie reminded me it’s now family time,” says Thomas, the father of four young children. “Annie said: ‘You don’t have an excuse now to go to work every day, 50 hours a week or more.’ She did a real good job when I retired of making sure I understood that our kids only are going to be kids once. As usual, she was right.”
While later working for NFL Network as an analyst, he was sent to Germany in 2022 to cover the league’s first regular season game there. That is when he discovered that American Football was being played throughout Europe. The new 17-team European League of Football had kicked off its initial season the previous year. He began making inquiries into the culture of the league.
“That’s when I started thinking,” Thomas recently told Men’s Health, “there’s really a chance that I could go over to Germany and my family and I could live out a little bit of a dream abroad for a while but I would still be coaching”
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He eventually got Annie to agree to take the kids out of school in the States and move last January to Germany where he is the offensive line coach for the ELF’s Munich Ravens.
The new ELF season only begins this month so the Thomas family has had time to acclimate to their new surroundings. The kids are in an international school and enjoying their new friends. Meanwhile, Papa Joe is not working 18 hours a day like he would if he were coaching back home.
“Being in Europe, all these players have jobs or are at school during the day.” he explains, “It allows me to balance family and coaching better than if I were to take a college or NFL job back home. I still have plenty of time to be with the family, see the kids, take them on trips, and do all the family stuff. Being here for a relatively short time, I think we have a really good balance.”
What does the future hold for the Thomas family after the ELF season ends in September? Thomas plans to take the family back to his home state of Wisconsin and enroll them in their schools there.
“We really haven’t made any plans after we get home, ” says Thomas. “We haven’t made any plans beyond that. But, you never know.”.
We at NFL Alumni salute Joe Thomas for following his football passion while at the same time caring for his wife and young children. It is largely that devotion and attention to detail that earned him a bust in Canton.
