Soccer will absolutely leave you with mobility issues - it's a sport that puts immense and rather unnatural load on your hips, knees and ankles. The insistence that overloading your joints won't cause long-term damage when it's because of a sport but will cause damage when it's because of something "trivial" is pure magical thinking. I promise you your ligaments and bursae don't care if the physical stress they go through is "worthy" or not.

Also, it's rather disingenuous to (correctly) point out that long-term overloading of the lower spine and hips from sitting at a desk will develop into chronic conditions unless countered...and then completely dodge the fact that professional soccer players after retirement have had careers full of mitigation (from physiotherapy to outright surgery) paid for by their clubs[0] to counter the acute damage that they suffer. And even with that, plenty of professional athletes still develop issues like chronic ankle instability, because there is only so much you can "ding up" and repair an ankle before it simply loses its structural integrity. Those of us who do play sports know just how much damage there is to counter, and we don't all have a VC-sized budget backing us up to mitigate it.

For goodness' sake we colloquially name various conditions for sports ("golfer's/baseball elbow", "tennis elbow", "runner's knee", etc). I have zero idea how anyone would come to the conclusion that it's rare for sports played for significant amounts of time to damage the body - again, unless they are conflating them with more normal forms of exercise.

0. And yes, the fact that it's paid for by their clubs is important - as I implied in my original comment, the vast majority of employers who demand that office workers sit at their desks for hours at a stretch certainly don't take any responsibility for any serious medical issues that arise from that.