When we look at the general public, we find that a significant portion of those who are financially inept, ignorant, or naïve about financial transactions of just about all types is disappointingly high. One would think that the education that students obtain throughout their schooling years would include a decent amount of time discussing and understanding financial transactions, such as interest rates, student loans, credit cards, mortgages, bills, and so on, but in actuality, this seldom occurs.
Not too surprisingly, those who lack a good financial understanding of investments, taxes, budgeting, and the management of money are going to be quite susceptible to being taken advantage of by those who delight in finding an easy and vulnerable target that they can exploit for their own personal advantage. Indeed, when it comes to professional athletes in which there are a significant amount of those athletes that come from trying economic circumstances and by definition, are young, makes for a perfect storm for those that desire to take advantage of them, and consequently there are plenty of athletes that have had gross earnings in the millions upon millions of dollars over their professional sports careers, but end up eventually becoming broke, which is a real shame.
To the credit of these sports franchises and leagues, there are financial advisors available for players to lean upon, but as much as this may help, it probably doesn’t go far enough, in the sense while players should have agency over their earnings and their financial decisions, it needs to be acknowledged that having an experience financial advisor constantly available who does not judge how a player spends their money, but is there to assist players in making good, prudent and sound decisions must definitely has its place, because in today’s sports world, some of the earnings of these players are so high, that there is a real need to see that players make and are assisted in making good financial decisions so that they can enjoy the fruits of their labor, after they have retired and moved on to other things.
This signifies that all of the major sports leagues need to actually take a full accounting of all their players to the best of their ability to ascertain as to whether particular financial pitfalls seem to come up rather commonly that players suffer from and then to push forth programs that will help to fix and to alleviate those bad outcomes. All of this necessitates these sports franchises and leagues actually digging deep into their player’s financial activities. No doubt, players would be concerned about the neutrality of such an investigation and should have the option of opting in or opting out, in addition to the fact that those looking into the financial affairs of professional athletes should not be beholden to the owners, but rather should be held to mandated fiduciary responsibilities that necessitate that they keep confidential what should be confidential, and that their overall objective is to benefit the player and their welfare, above all.