About 75% of NFL players experience financial difficulties within two years of retirement, according to Sports Illustrated.
A 2015 study found that nearly 2% of NFL players go bankrupt within two years of retirement and nearly 16% within 12 years.
Quite surprisingly, these numbers “are not affected by a player’s total earnings or career length. Having played for a long time and having been a successful and well-paid player does not provide much protection against the risk of going bankrupt,” concluded the study, which did not determine what is behind the high bankruptcy rate among NFL players.
It’s not just football players. According to Fox Business, 78% of professional athletes lose their wealth within three years of retirement.
“You oftentimes see these professional athletes looking to help out family members, to help out people who are close to them as they were growing up, which causes them to, a lot of times, instead of maybe building their own foundation and creating a solid position for themselves in the future, to try and help everyone else along the way,” Craig Brown, an NKSFB Sports Business Division partner, told Fox Business.
Fox News reports on how one Dallas Cowboys player says he wasted his money early in his career. Here’s the start of the story:
Dallas Cowboys defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence said he wasted money at a disastrous pace early in his NFL career.
Lawrence opened up about his past financial struggles during an appearance on the “Level Up Lifestyle” podcast this week, vividly remembering the moment he realized he was broke.
“The end of my third year, I go completely broke. I get that phone call from my accountant, and he’s like ‘Hey man, you don’t have no more money in your account.’ I’m like ‘What do you mean no more, you mean like zero dollars? What are you saying?’ And he’s like ‘I mean like negative $100,’” Lawrence said.
The Cowboys drafted Lawrence in the second round of the 2014 NFL Draft out of Boise State. His rookie contract was for a total of $5.5 million and included a $2.3 million signing bonus and base salaries of $420,000, $670,000 and $703,000 across those first three seasons.
Lawrence was also caught using amphetamines in his third season in 2016. He was suspended for four games for violating the NFL’s performance-enhancing drug policy.