Basic Trope: A character suffers an injury that makes them unable to continue their career.
- Straight: Bob breaks his leg and has to retire as a football player.
- Exaggerated: Bob nearly dies in a car crash and is mostly paralyzed afterwards, forcing him to retire as a football player.
- Downplayed: Bob injures his leg badly, and retires from being a football player until he gets better.
- Justified: Truth in Television: many people have to retire from their career due to suffering a severe injury, often to prevent them from further injury.
- Inverted: Bob, who has been paralyzed for most of his life, is suddenly cured. He decides to pursue a career as a football player.
- Subverted: Although it seems Bob is injured, he gets back up and continues the game...
- Double Subverted: ...and ends up being injured for real, forcing him to retire.
- Parodied: Bob mentions that he had to retire from the football team due to breaking his leg. Bob is a snake.
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: Nobody has to retire from their career because of an injury.
- Enforced:
- "We need to add some drama to this sports movie. Usually there's a scene where a character gets injured and has to retire from the team, so let's add that."
- Alternatively, "We need Alice to come in and save the day. How should she do that?" "Let's have the best member of the team, Bob, get an injury that prevents him from continuing."
- Zane, Bob's actor, broke his own legs.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Carl, The Bully from the Opposing Sports Team, intentionally causes Bob a severe injury.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Bob takes care to prevent injuring himself during his job.
- Discussed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Bob struggles to recover from the loss of his career, due to devoting much of his time and effort into football that he simply never bothered to develop any other useful skills or alternate career paths out of pure arrogance and the belief that he would be a star. Needless to say, he ends up very troubled and embittered by this turn of events.
- It becomes thoroughly ironic when it's revealed that Bob's career ending injury was actually because he had tried to inflict this onto another player, because of his own belief that the other player was an obstacle to his own future. Needless to say, when people find out the truth behind his injury, sympathy for his situation vanishes rapidly, replaced by disgust and noting how he destroyed his own career out of his own hubris.
- It's revealed that his injury was intentionally caused by Carl, whose life Bob had destroyed prior out of sheer petty Jerkass behavior, and whom had gotten away with it. Carl, infuriated at Bob's success at his expense, decided to pay him back one hundred-fold by brutally destroying his leg beyond repair. People who find out think that while Carl went too far, Bob very much should have seen this coming, and that his earlier cruelty had been paid back hard.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob is eventually called out on his embitterment, pointing out that not being able to pursue his dream job doesn't make things the end of the world, and that rather than letting his embitterment control his life, he should try to find a new path in life. With sufficient support and experimentation, Bob does eventually come to find something that he enjoys as much as football, while recognizing that he'd likely have never considered this path if he hadn't suffered his injury, even though he still does miss football.
- Conversely, it turns out his injury was a good thing, because he had focused so much on the glamour and glory of football that he never bothered to really understand the downsides of the sport, such as various chronic pains and traumas, risk of being fleeced by grifters and con artists due to his fame and fortune, his career likely being very short-lived due to how quickly the sport churns through players, etc. That make him realize that rather than losing his chance of being a contender, he actually dodged a bullet from a lifetime of pain, mistrust, and hurt that he never considered.
- Conversed: ???
- Played for Drama: Bob was the team's star player, and now that he's been forced to drop out, his team is unlikely to win the tournament.
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