I love playing football, being out on the pitch with a ball, and I will be a little sad when that ends.

Bergkamp frames football not as celebrity or achievement but as a simple, bodily pleasure: being on the pitch with a ball. The second clause—anticipating sadness when it ends—acknowledges the finite nature of an athletic career and the identity shift retirement brings. The quote’s understated tone fits Bergkamp’s public persona: reserved, craft-focused, and motivated by the game itself rather than spectacle. Read this way, it becomes a concise statement of intrinsic motivation and of the melancholy that can accompany leaving a lifelong practice, even when retirement is expected or successful.