The new football season starts next month and I’m feeling genuinely optimistic about my team’s chances – although being a Spurs’ fan we haven’t had too much to cheer about for a while!

Earnings

As well as reading about the recent Spurs signings, it’s interesting to see the salaries that the players earn with Harry Kane receiving the highest salary at £200,000 per week or £10.4m per year. No doubt he earns much more than this with various sponsorship deals and other add-ons.

Although the highest paid players in the Premier League can earn huge amounts, according to the Professional Footballers Association, the average Premier League footballer earns around £50,000 per week which is still a significant amount at around £2.6m a year. Even in the Championship, the average wage is around £35,000 per week. Although the wages are high, a footballer’s career might only last around 8 years.

It is notable that players in the Women’s Super League only get paid a fraction of this – the Sun Newspaper, in an article on 8th March 2022, reported that players were earning as little as £20,000 per year whereas the Telegraph Sport reported that some of the WSL’s best paid players were earning 50 times less than male players in the Premiership. Hopefully with the success of the Euros and the increased popularity of the women’s game, this gap will be reduced.

With my financial planner’s hat on, let’s assume that, once tax has been paid, the average Premier League footballer has amassed earnings of around £12m before they retire from the game as well as an expensive house and car. For someone in their early thirties, whose life has been dominated by football, it will be a challenge to manage their money for the rest of their lives without any professional help.

Spending Too Much

In an article in the Mirror on 25th February 2018, the former Spurs player, David Bentley, said that many multi-millionaire young footballers will “end up skint because they are being mismanaged and misrepresented”. He also said that, “they’re spending more than they should be spending given how their wages average out over the course of their lifetimes”.

The sporting charity XPro, in a BBC article in March 2013, claims as many as three in five Premier League footballers face bankruptcy within five years of retiring from the game.

Lifestyle Financial Planning

For footballers whose career and earnings potential may only stretch for several years, Lifestyle Financial Planning is crucial and can help answer some of the big questions:

What do I want my life, post playing football, to look like?
How much can I comfortably spend without running out of money?
How can I ensure that my money is invested appropriately?
How can I ensure that my family is taken care of should anything happen to me?

With careful planning the money a footballer in the top divisions can earn during their professional career can set them up for life and provide the flexibility to pursue their ideal lifestyle after football.

Trusted Adviser

The big question is how does a successful footballer find the right trusted adviser especially given the news stories you tend to read about in the press about some terrible investment or dodgy tax scheme that a player or manager has invested in?

For me, the most important step is to appoint a lifestyle financial planner who is both a Certified Financial Planner and a Chartered Financial Planner (🙌). There are not many of these but they will have both the financial planning and technical skills to best serve the player (🙌).

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To discuss how Lifestyle Financial Planning can help you, please do get in touch.

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Lifestyle Financial Planning for Footballers

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