Tony Armstrong on confronting racism, why he's not afraid to fail and his new show, A Dog's World

It seems like a rather harsh judgement, particularly when you consider how few people ever make it to play in the AFL, but Tony Armstrong regards his football career as a failure.

Armstrong played 35 games across three clubs, the Adelaide Crows, Sydney Swans and Collingwood, from 2007 to 2015 before hanging up his boots with unfulfilled ambitions at the age of 25.

«I think 100 per cent that I failed,» Armstrong says.

«What makes anyone who has played at an elite sporting level good is that you are never content but for me, success would have been playing 250 games of AFL, a premiership in there, being a dominant player for a long period of time and I wasn't that and that's OK. I am ok with having failed.»

It was undoubtedly a bitter disappointment and many a delisted player for whom footy is everything has struggled to then change tracks, but Armstrong says it taught him a valuable life lesson.

«It made me more willing to take risks, to put myself out there,» he says.

«The job I'm in now [presenting sport on News Breakfast] could be quite a stressful job but I dot my 'i's and I cross my 't's', I work hard, I do my best and that's all I can do. If I fail, which at some point might happen, I know I'll be OK because I've failed before and I'm OK. I'm so grateful to have learned that lesson so young.»

This relaxed, philosophical attitude has enabled Armstrong to laugh off the occasional on-air stumble, as he did last September when reading a story about Australian cricket captain Tim Paine needing neck surgery for a bulging disc and accidentally saying Paine had a «bulging dick».

«Isn't that the funniest thing ever?», he laughs, recalling the moment.

«I think that's just hilarious. It just happened so quickly and before I knew it