Athletes and the short window

Every profession has a shape to its income. Most people's rises slowly, peaks in their fifties, and tapers. A professional athlete's is a spike. It arrives at twenty-two, lasts a few years, and stops — usually before the person is old enough to have written a will, appointed a health care surrogate, or thought seriously about anything ending.

That shape is the whole story, and there is real research on it rather than folklore.

In 2009, Sports Illustrated published Pablo S. Torre's “How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke,” which reported that 78% of former NFL players were bankrupt or under financial stress within two years of retirement and that an estimated 60% of NBA players were broke within five. The article became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine's online history and inspired the ESPN documentary Broke. It has also been sharply criticised for the sourcing of those two numbers, and this archive will not present them as established.

The number that is established is smaller, harder, and in some ways worse.

Money arriving faster than structure

The economists framed it as a test of the life-cycle hypothesis — the idea that people save when income is high to cover the years when it is low. Athletes are the cleanest natural experiment available, because the spike is unmistakable and everybody involved knows the date it ends.

They failed the test. Not slightly, and not only the ones who earned least. Total career earnings and career length had almost no effect on bankruptcy risk. A long, lucrative career bought very little protection.

The average NFL career is widely reported at about 3.3 years. Other sports run longer — figures around five to six years are commonly cited for baseball and hockey, four to five for basketball — but the structure is the same everywhere: the earning window closes decades before the spending window does.

For estate planning, the specific consequence is not “athletes are bad with money.” It is that the documents get written for a life stage that is already over. A will signed at twenty-four, if one is signed at all, names a parent as beneficiary and a college friend as executor. It is not revisited when there is a spouse, a child, a business interest, and a brand.

The risk of dying young is not theoretical

Most wealthy people can plan on the reasonable assumption that they will have time. This cohort cannot, and the archive is full of the evidence.

Sean Taylor was 24. He died on November 27, 2007, of injuries sustained in a shooting during a break-in at his home in Miami. He had a daughter who was eighteen months old, and he had no will.

What followed is the cleanest illustration in American sport of what intestacy actually does. A judge ordered that essentially the whole estate — reported at roughly $5.7 million — pass to his only child. His mother received nothing. Neither did his grandmother, his great-grandmother, two half-siblings, or the relatives who had been supported by him during his life. Reporting a year later described her as unable to pay the taxes on a house he had bought for her in 2005.

There is no villain in that paragraph. Intestacy is not a punishment; it is a default. The statute does exactly what it says: descendants first, and everyone else after. A one-page will naming his mother for a share, or a life insurance beneficiary designation, would have changed the entire outcome. He had one such designation — a $650,000 policy naming his eldest sister — and it worked precisely as intended.

The pattern repeats across the archive with different names and the same structure: Payne Stewart at 42 in 1999, Dale Earnhardt at 49 at Daytona in 2001, Kobe Bryant at 41 in 2020, Junior Seau at 43 in 2012. Some had documents. Some had documents that had not been touched in years. The variable is never how much money there was.

• No will means the statute writes one. Every state has a default, and no state's default resembles what a twenty-four-year-old would have chosen.
• Beneficiary designations are the fastest fix available. Life insurance, retirement accounts, and pay-on-death registrations pass outside probate and can be changed in an afternoon.
• A minor cannot receive money. Leaving an estate to a small child does not produce a plan; it produces a court-supervised guardianship of the property until the child turns eighteen and then hands the whole balance over at once.

Earnings that begin at the funeral

The final structural feature is the one almost nobody plans for, because it sounds like a joke until it happens: for a small number of athletes, the largest transaction of the career occurs after death.

Arnold Palmer won $1,861,857 in prize money across 703 PGA Tour events. Forbes estimated his career earnings from appearances, endorsements, licensing and course design at $875 million. And then he died in September 2016 — and Forbes reported his estate earning $40 million in 2017, $40 million the year before, $35 million in 2018, $30 million in 2019, $25 million in 2020, and figures in the ten-to-fourteen-million range through 2025.

Read the first and last sentence of that paragraph together. In a single posthumous year, the Palmer estate out-earned his entire professional tournament career by more than twenty to one.

Kobe Bryant's estate topped the same Forbes list in 2022 at $400 million, driven by Coca-Cola's acquisition of full control of BodyArmor — a company in which he had taken a stake in 2014 — as part of a transaction reported at $5.6 billion. Muhammad Ali appeared on the 2018 list at $8 million.

These are not royalties in the musician's sense. They are licensing revenue from a name, a face, and a signature — assets that legally exist only because a statute says they survive death, and that are only worth anything if somebody has been given clear authority to license them. Which is a drafting question, and a valuation question, and a tax question, and it is why the estates that handle this well look nothing like the estates that do not.

Four documents, none of them exotic

The remedies here are unglamorous and cheap relative to the sums involved.

• A revocable trust, funded, instead of a will alone. It keeps the inventory private — relevant when the beneficiary is a minor and the numbers will be reported — and it avoids a probate court in every state where property sits.
• Beneficiary designations checked against the plan every single year. They override the will. They are the most common single point of failure in a young person's estate, and they take twenty minutes.
• A trust for the child rather than an outright gift. Staged distributions, a named trustee, and no eighteenth-birthday cliff. This is the difference between the Sean Taylor outcome and a plan.
• A written licence of name and likeness, with a named person authorised to grant it. Publicity rights are property. If nobody is authorised to license them, the family spends the first two years arguing about who can sign.

And one behavioural point that the NBER authors' own data supports better than any adviser's anecdote. Because career length and total earnings did not predict bankruptcy, the fix is not earning more. It is structure imposed early — while the income is arriving, not after it stops.