Precedents offer little comfort to former international footballer of the year George Weah in his bid to become president of Liberia. Weah, 39, a millionaire after plying his trade in France, Italy and England, is a front-runner in the race to rule his troubled nation after Tuesday's election.
National leaders have emerged from a variety of backgrounds.
Playwright and poet Vaclav Havel survived imprisonment to become president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 following the Velvet Revolution.
Pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski was named prime minister of Poland in 1919 and elected president of his country's provisional government based in Paris in 1940 at the age of 90.
Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor and former governor of California, was elected US president in 1980 and again four years later.
Yet even in the United States, where professional athletes enjoy the same prestige and inflated salaries as film stars, nobody has stepped from the playing arena via the ballot box to the highest post in the land.
LANDSLIDE VICTORY: Jack Kemp was an outstanding quarterback, a position demanding speed of thought and reflex, during a professional American football career starting in 1957.
He led the Buffalo Bills to three straight Eastern Division titles and two American Football League (AFL) championships in 1964 and 1965. He was the first 3,000-yard passer in the AFL and was named the league's Most Valuable Player in 1965.
After football Kemp, a Republican, won a landslide victory to the House of Representatives. He was chosen by Bob Dole as his running mate in the 1996 presidential election but the pair lost to the incumbent Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Kemp declined to run in 2004.
On the other side of the political fence Bill Bradley, a member of the American gold medal basketball team at the 1964 Olympics, was acclaimed by the New Yorker magazine as a potential president at the age of 21.
After a 10-year career with the New York Knicks he entered the political arena as the Democratic senator for New Jersey at the age of 35.
Bradley attracted supporters but after finally deciding to run for the presidency he was comprehensively trounced by Gore in the 2000 Democratic primaries.
Imran Khan, the greatest cricketer produced by Pakistan, succeeded in uniting a notoriously fractious team on the field and took his country to the 1992 World Cup.
Revered as a sportsman in Pakistan, Imran failed to convert adulation into votes when he formed the Tehrik-e-Insaaf party which performed miserably in two general elections.
He is at present the only member of his own party to hold a seat in the national assembly.
SPORTS POLITICS: Twice Olympic 1,500 metres champion Seb Coe, the man credited with bringing the 2012 Games to London, was viewed as a potential prime minister when he won a parliamentary seat for the Conservative Party in 1992. After five years on the backbenches he was ousted in the 1997 Labour landslide.
Coe has since been active in sports politics, joining the great Ukrainian pole vaulter Sergei Bubka as a member of the International Association of Athletics Federations' (IAAF) ruling council. Bubka has been a member of the Ukrainian parliament since 2002.
Another notable member of parliament was Gyula Grosics, the goalkeeper in the great Hungarian side which beat England 6-3 at Wembley in 1953. Argentine Carlos Reutemann, runner-up in the 1981 Grand Prix drivers' championship, later became governor of Santa Fe.
The Edwardian era produced one remarkable sportsman who seemed destined for an equally glittering political career.
C.B. Fry captained England at cricket against Australia and scored a record six first-class centuries in a row. He equalled the world long jump record and played soccer for his country and rugby union for the Barbarians invitation side.
While serving as a deputy for the Indian delegation at the fledgling League of Nations, Fry was offered the throne of Albania.
Deciding that he had too little money to afford the post, Fry declined. The country's former prime minister Ahmed-I-Zog was crowned King Zog in 1928.
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