TODAY will mark a first for 22-year-old Fergus Watts — the first time he has attended an AFL game since he stopped being an AFL footballer. St Kilda has invited its one-gamer, as it has every player who ever ran out alongside Robert Harvey, to take part in the champion's home-and-away farewell.

And it is purely by coincidence that Watts will be watching the Saints take on Adelaide, the club that drafted him at pick No. 14 the day after his last VCE exam in 2003. For two years, he says, he was treated and supported in the manner first-round draft picks have come to expect. Then Watts decided he wanted to come home and even going out for a coffee became a living nightmare. The town turned on him.

All his life, Watts' ambition was to become an AFL player. The day that Adelaide chose him, someone mentioned that the average lifespan of a footballer was about four years. "That's not very long," he thought to himself, never dreaming that that statistic could be him.

And yet now, after almost a year out of the game, Watts remains determined not to finish up a cautionary tale. Despite the devastating turns his AFL journey took for most of those four seasons, and the physical pain that will accompany him for the remainder of his amateur football career, he still believes he is better for the experience.

After two years of solid development with the Crows and five senior games, Watts went against the advice of his father Jim, then the St Kilda chief executive, and made the decision to come home. Watts senior tried to persuade his son to remain with the Crows and still reportedly bristles at allegations that it was nepotism that took him to the club.

Still treated with some disdain by Adelaide supporters who resented the "wasted" first-round draft choice, the Saints traded pick 17 for Watts.

Other clubs were prepared to offer high picks, but Watts and the Saints chose each other, and he was out of contract, so the Crows had no choice but to trade him. But nowadays, St Kilda fans can be quite vitriolic also.

Watts kicked a goal in his Saints debut against West Coast in round one, 2005, broke an ankle in the reserves two weeks later and, nine operations later, retired after never managing another senior game.

He agrees his failure to make the grade was a combination of bad luck, bad timing and his own physical deficiencies.

"Players like me sort of went out of vogue pretty quickly," Watts said last week.

"Big key-position players are being phased out out unless they are really unique and I never had much speed anyway. You need mobility to cover the ground and after I broke my leg, I never really got it back."

Yesterday, Watts, who plays for Wesley's Old Collegians at the top of the A-grade ladder in the Victorian Amateur Football Association, took on his brother Jack's University Blues team in the last round of the season.

The Watts brothers are no relation to the other Jack Watts, who is expected to become this year's No. 1 choice in the national draft. Coincidentally, all three Watts started their junior football at East Sandringham.

Watts was occasionally booed and heckled as he generally is — "just your general 'AFL hack' sort of stuff" — but he said nothing could be as bad as the vitriol that came his way during the SANFL finals series during his last year at Adelaide.

"I had to grow a really thick skin," he says.

"Going out for a coffee with mates even became a chore.

"It was an incredibly hard four years but a great four years as well. In terms of life experience, I would never trade it."

Watts has turned that life experience into a business with some help from the AFL system, which will reward his four years with a $50,000 end-of-career lump sum due at the end of this year.

The business has been established through a desire to engage young people in their employment in this new world of mobile telephones, internet and moveable workplaces.

"When I came out of footy, a few things hit me quite hard, and one of them was that most young people don't like going to work in the nine-to-five sense that their parents did," Watts said.

"The line between work and play is more blurred. My aim is to go into companies and look at ways of engaging staff and keeping them in the workplace for more than a year or two.

"Our generation is different and it's changed even since I started in the AFL system. When I came out of the system, I noticed how much more player-driven and player-run clubs were.

"Players are more professional now and more accountable for their actions."

Watts hesitated when asked which club he would be supporting today before nominating St Kilda — "probably".

Coming to terms with the end of the dream that accompanied him throughout his school life is not something he wishes to delve into too deeply but there is a sense that watching today's game will be some sort of hurdle to overcome.

Still, as Watts said, he would rather have tried and failed than the alternative.