Meet Connar Mackay

We were lucky to catch up with Connar Mackay recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Connar, so happy you were able to devote some time to sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our community. So, we’ve always admired how you have seemingly never let nay-sayers or haters keep you down. Can you talk to us about how to persist despite the negative energy that so often is thrown at folks trying to do something special with their lives?

My whole life I’ve always had people doubt me, even now I still do. I want to be successful for me, and for all the sacrifices my family has made for me to chase my dreams, but in order to block out the noise, it’s essential that I believe in myself. If I don’t believe in myself first and foremost, then why should anyone else?

It gets difficult sometimes, especially my first couple years here when I first moved to America to play collegiate soccer. My family sacrificed a lot for me to be here, and I didn’t quite perform how I knew I could. Same thing when I started posting content earlier this year, and it took me a while to start gaining some traction, and it happened when I dropped out of college for a semester to figure out what direction I wanted to go in, and even now it can still be tough sometimes.

With trying to chase success on multiple fronts comes a lot of noise from people at home, online, or within your environment who hear what you’re trying to achieve but can only see how far you still have to go, and that can be tough to deal with, especially when I was 18 years old and moved 10,000 miles from home. But I believed in myself, and saw the vision and thought to myself that if I don’t try it all now, I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life. If people don’t agree with what I’m doing, then who really cares? Because when I do succeed, I know everyone will be asking me how I did it all, and if I do fail, then at least I can say I gave it my all, which I can live with. So that for me is how I persist despite any hate or doubt.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

Starting from the beginning, I’ve got quite the diverse background being Scottish-American, but growing up abroad, mainly in Singapore. I’ve been playing soccer since the age of 4, and have always dreamt of playing professionally. Throughout my high school years, I went from being unsigned to any club at 16 during COVID, to making my my first team debut during preseason for a Singapore Premier League club, Balestier Khalsa FC at 18 and being awarded Athlete of the Year in High School.

During COVID, my mother, who ran track collegiately, suggested to me that I could use my American roots to go back to the US to play college soccer. I wanted to use my Scottish roots and chase a pro contract in the UK, but with all the uncertainty that COVID brought in the soccer scene, pursuing college soccer provided some form of stability for my next steps and so I went after it. In August 2023, I made my move to Boston, MA to play Division II soccer at Bentley University. In my 18 months there, I had a good experience but it wasn’t quite going to plan, between a season-ending injury and then being in-and-out the lineup, I learnt a lot about myself, and how badly I wanted to play professionally, but I knew it wasn’t the right environment for me, and so I decided I wanted to transfer.

With all the uncertainty of the transfer portal, I decided to drop out of college for a semester, take a step back and figure things out. And so, I moved to Miami in January. I knew a few people there from my time there that previous summer playing semi-professionally, and from a few trips down, but not many. There was so much uncertainty about what was next, but I learnt to be resilient. I reached out to hundreds of schools, and got interest from some great Division I and II programs, but ultimately accepted the offer to play at Eckerd College, another Division II school, in St. Petersburg, FL, in the best Division II conference in the country.

In my time out of school, I went all-in on content creation. I was documenting my journey via TikTok when I first moved to Boston, but now that I was out of school, I decided I wanted to take it seriously because I saw the amount of opportunity that could come from it. So, I decided to find the right mentors and put my focus off the pitch into growing my personal brand on Instagram. My focus has been sharing my journey through the game, providing value to my audience and showing insight into what it’s like to be a college athlete chasing a professional career, while also pursuing other goals off the pitch too.

Ten months down the line, I’ve accumulated millions of views, thousands of likes and am on my road to hitting 10,000 followers. While it’s not the largest following, my content has rewarded me with brand deals with the likes of Subway, CVS, STATSport, C4, iHerb and many more.

Having just finished my third collegiate season and my first in St. Pete, I finally found the right environment for me, and found some success this year, scoring my first collegiate goal, and making impacts against some of the best teams in the nation.

So heading into 2026, I definitely have a lot I want to achieve. I want to have a standout year on the pitch to propel myself into a professional soccer career, and that’s my main focus. But there’s also more I want to achieve, like reaching 20,000+ followers on Instagram, and launching PRIMIS, my new business in social media management. With experience as a social media manager for two small businesses, and in content creation for 2+ years, I wanted to take it to the next level and that’s when I came to the idea of starting PRIMIS. The past couple months, I’ve been working on setting things up and building PRIMIS from the ground up, and going into the new year, now it’s about getting our name out there and finding businesses that need real help in transforming their online presence.

Making it as a professional athlete has it’s perks and on it’s own is such an achievement. But, at the lower levels, it comes with its drawbacks, the main one being financial, so by pursuing these endeavours off the pitch in content and business, it allows me to build the life I want to live during my career, and far after it’s over too.

And I think that’s what’s so exciting about my story from an outside perspective is that at the end of the day, I’m just a kid who’s been all over the world, chasing his dreams with a solid foundation set in stone and everything in front of me to gain.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Hard work, resilience and delusion. When chasing a path that isn’t ‘normal’, you have to almost be slightly delusional to believe that it’s all going to work out how you want it to, and when things don’t go your way that’s when you have to be resilient enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when the odds are stacked against you. And then, to even stand a chance against those odds, you just simply have to outwork everyone around you. Yes, you have to work smart, but if you don’t put in the time and effort, you’ll never get anywhere.

Even though I believe I’m only still at the start of my journey, for people that are starting out on theirs, the best way to develop these skills are to set out small tasks for you to complete that work towards accomplishing your goals. Every time you complete a task it’s a win, and if you stack enough small wins, you’ll start to be more confident in your ability to achieve your goals, and then you’ll work even harder, and you’ll start to have that slight delusion of how much you can achieve, and you need that in order to develop your resilience, because you need to keep setting out tasks to accomplish and you need to experience failure to develop that resilience and to see how badly you want to succeed.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

Accountability. In previous years, I would always try to deflect the responsibility of an action onto someone or something else. If I didn’t get the playing time I wanted, or didn’t get as many views on a video. And sure, there are factors outside your control such as a coach on a team, or an algorithm on a social platform. But at the end of the day, if you don’t take accountability for your actions and results, you’ll never grow. The moment you start to take accountability is the moment you’ll start to seriously 10x your progress, and I’ve seen it in soccer, content and business.

Especially in starting up PRIMIS, where all the work is on you to get it off the ground and running, you quickly learn that if you don’t find new clients, or deliver good work for a company, it’s on you, because you’re just starting out and you’re a one-man team so there’s nowhere else to point the finger, and that’s a lesson I’ve learned that’s helped me in growing PRIMIS, but also has translated in how I approach soccer & my personal brand.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/connar.mackay
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connar-mackay/