From talented football player to successful sales manager
We have many employees with interesting stories, and Alex Nilsson is one of them. With an impressive football career and being a successful sales manager at Enteractive, we sat down with him to find out how he managed to balance these two careers.
Alex grew up in Sweden, but is also half Greek. His football career started at 15 years old when he made his debut in Allsvenskan, the Swedish League. At 17 years old, he had already signed a professional contract at Malmö FF, the biggest club in Sweden. This made him the youngest person in the history of Malmö to sign a professional contract at the club.
He spent 5 years at Malmö FF, won one league title, played in the qualifications for the Champions League, and then he saw an opportunity in Malta and took it. Fast forward, Alex has been living in Malta for almost 7 years and is currently playing for St. Andrews, a first division club in the Maltese football league.
Comparing the two leagues in Malta and Sweden, Alex mentioned advantages and disadvantages for both. In Malta, he likes that he doesn’t have to travel for hours to get to matches, whereas in Sweden he would spend a lot of time travelling on his match day. However, he does miss playing on natural grass and having training early in the morning, the way they do in Sweden.
After 3 years playing football in Malta, Alex was 25 years old and still able to make a living from football, considering himself lucky to be able to do that. But he was looking for something on the side to keep him busy before football training started in the evening. He wanted to use the extra time he had during the day to prepare himself for a career after football.
In 2018, he was recruited by Enteractive for a role as a part-time (Re)activation agent. Alex truly fulfilled his potential and quickly climbed the ladder to become country manager for 7 markets – UK, Canada, Germany, Sweden, India, Greece, and Hungary.
Obviously, being a professional football player has its differences from being a full-time sales manager. The biggest challenge for him was getting used to working 8 hours a day in an office. As a football player, he didn’t have to spend long hours inside. But despite the two careers being almost polar opposites, he finds that 
sales and football actually have a lot of things in common.
He explains: “As a sales agent, you need to reach your targets just like a football player needs his goals. You want to achieve and get a promotion. Because of these similarities, I have brought a lot of skills with me to my sales job at Enteractive, which I learned from playing football.”
He mentions that an example of this skill is being a team player. Just like a football team, it’s crucial to work together at Enteractive to achieve your goals. Since it’s such a multicultural group, it’s important to understand how you need to handle different types of people with different character traits. According to Alex, this is something that Enteractive promotes well within the teams and it’s one of the main reasons he likes working at Enteractive so much, the atmosphere is amazing and all the teams get on really well together.
For the foreseeable future, Alex wants to keep living in Malta as he loves both of his jobs and really settled in the country. The thing he loves the most about the island is the Mediterranean mentality. It’s much more relaxed than Sweden and the weather is a wonderful bonus to living here. However, he sometimes misses his family, friends and the nature back home in Sweden – it will always be his home country.
When Alex is not playing football in his free time, he enjoys going to nice restaurants for dinner. Particularly sushi, which one of his favourites. During Covid-19, he has also discovered a new passion: Padel. This is a racquet sport and can be described as a mix between tennis and squash. This game is played by many of Alex’s colleagues at Enteractive.
Alex’s story shows us that we don’t know what paths we’ll take in our lives, but if we remain open minded and passionate about the things we do, everything will fall into place.
We are growing rapidly and are always looking for new additions to the team. Did Alex’s story spark your interest to work at Enteractive? Connect with us on careers.enteractive.com and we will be in touch soon!
