Fantastic wealth for professional footballers has only been a recent thing, traditionally footballers have gone into football after retirement, as managers, scouts, coaches, pundits, or, famously, have invested their money to become landlord of a public house where they proceed to either manage it until their death or drink away the profits.
Apparently Fergie got an alimony settlement of £20,000 a year. McDonalds managers make more, maybe she should look into that or sue her lawyer for incompetence. Diana apparently learned her lesson from Fergie and settled at £20M. If you’re a prominent public figure and going to cut off the wife with a pittance, don’t be surprised if she does things to earn money that embarass you. Pierre Trudeau found that out the hard way, but then he had the good grace to punch his wife in the face when she objected to it.
Until the 1980s, professional soccer players here were not paid very much. They were well paid, by working class standards, but not megabucks. That started when new TV channels with a lot of money to spend began pouring money into the game. In the 1970s, football appeared to be dying, gates were declining, the violence and poor facilities were putting the pop-and-son market off it, and nobody seemed to know what to do to reverse the decline. Then Rupert Murdock appeared, with deals which eclipsed what the old networks were capable of paying. Players now moved between clubs, and countries, very easily and they could get pretty rich if their careers weren’t cut short by injury.
My understanding is Fergie took a small amount of money because she wanted to remain on good terms with the royal family. Why she wanted to remain close to that family of inbred idiots is beyond me. Diana knew better to get a lot of money but she wasn’t smart enough to wear a seat and shoulder belt in a speeding car.
I’d guess NFL players have more problems because 1) the league shafts team with few guaranteed contracts 2) the intense build up pressure to play hard, frenzied football on Sunday and then come down helps build behavior like that off the field. Making sound financial decisions requires sober, clear headed thought.
There was a Dallas Cowboy front office guy, Tex Schramm I think, who said they often tried to bring financial advisors in to teach the players how to spend/invest their money. Invariably they wanted to make the riskiest investments possible, they weren’t satisfied with steady gains.
Don’t know too much about footballers/soccer players but my general impression of Formula 1 drivers is they do well. The ones that weren’t killed driving as was the case with about 10-20% every year 40 years ago. Jackie Stewart and Eddie Irvine strike me as particularly shrewd with money.
This last was largely due to Bosman and EU labour regulations, rather than Rupert.
No, not really. I have seen a lot of people come into money very quickly (I define this as less than 5 years) and it basically is either squandered or sensibly invested… and frankly in the first couple of years it’s almost always squandered. If there’s stuff left and they’re still earning then people start acting more sensibly.
I have also seen people lose fortunes in minutes. Frankly the effects of that are probably more interesting.