Athletes and money: sudden earnings, sudden end

“When I got my first big prize, I bought my mum a car. The last time I checked my account, I didn’t know who to tell.”

Many athletes could say that sentence: people who in a few years earned more than their parents did in a decade — and then, within a few months, were left without an income. There is often very little time between those two moments. And very few conversations.

In sport, money is a subject that is talked about a great deal and, at the same time, hardly at all. The media report on contracts and prize money, but almost no one talks about what happens to a person and their family when money arrives and when it leaves. This piece is not financial advice, and I will not tell you how to save or invest — that is not my field, and there are other professionals for it. I will write about what happens around money in the mind, in relationships and in the family. Because that is often where it is decided whether money will be a support or a burden.

Money that comes in waves

Most people have an income that is more or less steady. An athlete’s income often looks more like a swell: a few years of almost nothing, then a sudden wave — a prize, a contract, a sponsor — then another drop because of an injury, a bad season or simply because a contract has run out. A career is short, often ending at an age when others are only getting properly started, and it is almost never clear when it will end.

How demanding this is can be seen in a study published in 2015 by the economists Kyle Carlson, Joshua Kim, Annamaria Lusardi and Colin Camerer. They looked at players in the American professional football league and found that about 16 per cent of players had filed for personal bankruptcy within twelve years of the end of their careers. Even more surprisingly, the risk was not substantially lower among those who had earned more or played longer. A high income on its own, in other words, did not protect them.

American sport is, of course, a different world. In Slovenia the great majority of elite athletes never earn the sums that make the news. Many live on grants, prize money and short contracts, some are employed in the sports units of public institutions, and many have had their sport funded out of the family budget for years. But the pattern the study reveals matters here too: the problem rarely lies only in the size of the amount. It often lies in how the money arrives, what it means and who has a say in it.

A curve unlike any other

When you talk to athletes about money, one shape keeps recurring. Income rises steeply and falls steeply. Expectations — their own and other people’s — rise with it, and then do not fall.

This gap is not only financial. It is emotional too. It is home to questions that are hard to say out loud: Who am I if I no longer earn? What will they say at home? How do I tell my partner that things will not go on as before? And because these questions hurt, many avoid them by carrying on as if the gap were not there.

Sudden earnings: what happens inside a person

Sudden money is not just good news. For many it is also a shock. Someone who grew up in a family where every euro had to be counted finds themselves in a world where people bring them offers, advisers bring them advice and acquaintances bring them requests. The rules they knew suddenly no longer apply.

Along with this often come feelings nobody expects. Guilt, because you have more than your brothers, sisters or childhood friends. A sense of not deserving it, as if someone could unmask you at any moment. Mistrust, because you no longer know who is with you for your sake and who for the money. And often loneliness too, because there is no one you can talk to about it without sounding ungrateful.

Sudden earnings often come when a person is still very young — sometimes before the age of twenty. Decisions that others would make gradually, over years and through mistakes with smaller sums, have to be made all at once. It is no coincidence that this is when the beliefs about money they brought from home push their way to the front.

Who else is sitting at the table

In family therapy we rarely see money as one person’s private affair. We see it as part of a system. A sporting career is almost always a family project: parents drove to training, paid for equipment and training camps, gave up holidays, sometimes changed jobs or moved house. Brothers and sisters stepped into the background. When money arrives, everyone in the family — whether they say it or not — has their own idea of what they are owed.

Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy coined the term invisible loyalties for such unseen family accounts. He described how families keep a kind of ledger of debts and merits that is passed down from generation to generation. An athlete who feels they owe their parents everything will find it hard to say “no” to a request for a loan, to a brother opening a business, or to an uncle who needs a new roof. Not because they cannot count, but because “no” would sound like betrayal.

Sometimes the roles in a family even reverse. A young person becomes the one who looks after their parents, pays their bills and solves their crises. In psychotherapy we call this parentification — when a child takes on a role that belongs to the adults. From the outside it looks like gratitude and generosity. From the inside it is often a burden a person carries quietly and cannot put down even when the money runs out. How one change moves the whole family I have described in The family as a system.

There is the partner too. A partner who stood by the athlete through the years of training has expectations and fears of their own. Often they also feel they cannot say anything about money because they “didn’t earn it themselves”. In a couple where money is not talked about, it is argued about.

Money scripts we bring from home

The psychologist Brad Klontz and his colleagues described four common clusters of beliefs about money, which they called money scripts. These beliefs mostly take shape in childhood, through what we saw and heard at home, and they guide us without our being aware of them. In athletes, who meet large sums of money early and suddenly, they come to light especially clearly.

In their research Klontz and colleagues showed that some of these scripts are linked to a less favourable financial position — money avoidance and money worship, for example, to lower income and net worth. For therapy, though, something else matters more: every script has its own story. Who at home said that money corrupts people? To whom did money mean safety, to whom shame, to whom proof? Once you know the story, you have a choice about whether to follow it.

When the career goes out, so does the income

The end of a career is one of the biggest changes in an athlete’s life. A review of studies published in 2013 by Sunghee Park, David Lavallee and David Tod showed that the transition is harder above all when the end is sudden or involuntary — because of an injury, for instance — and when the athlete’s identity is built almost entirely on sport. Among the factors that ease the transition, the researchers also mention planning and the support of loved ones. That this is serious is also shown by the 2019 review by Vincent Gouttebarge and colleagues: symptoms of anxiety or depression were reported by roughly a quarter of former elite athletes.

With money, this happens twice at once. A person loses a role, a routine, a team and the sense of being good at something — and at the same moment the income that was tied to all of it. The lifestyle, the commitments to family and the loans remain. I have written about what the end of a career does to your sense of who you are in When a career ends: who are you when you are no longer an athlete. Much that applies outside sport as well can be found in Retirement, the loss of a role and the question of meaning — an athlete, after all, “retires” at thirty.

That is exactly why it is worth starting the conversation about money during a career, not after it. Not as a financial plan — leave that to someone who knows finance — but as a conversation about what money will mean in your life once it no longer comes from competing.

The shame that silences

Financial difficulty is hard for anyone to talk about. For an athlete it is harder still, because the public thinks they “have more than enough”, and because they feel that admitting it would disappoint everyone who believed in them. So it often happens that a partner is the last to hear about debts, and parents never hear at all.

A conversation that is hard to begin often looks like this:

(composite, not a real person)
“How are things at home?”
“Fine. Mum is happy she finally has a new car.”
“And you?”
“Me … I don’t know how to tell her there won’t be a new contract next year.”
“What do you think she would say?”
“That I’ve let her down. Even though she would never say it out loud.”

That “even though” matters. Often it is not about what others would actually say, but about what a person thinks they think. This is where the difference I described in Guilt and shame are not the same — and the difference matters opens up: guilt says “I made a mistake”, shame says “I am a mistake”. The first can be put right; the second closes a person in on themselves.

Hiding has a cost. Long-lasting financial uncertainty is a source of chronic stress, which shows up in sleep, mood and relationships. For some, shame becomes mixed with the search for a quick fix — and here athletes are particularly vulnerable to gambling and betting, where knowing the sport gives a false sense of control. More on this in Addictions in sport: alcohol, gambling and painkillers and Gambling: the addiction with no smell that stays invisible.

If, alongside financial distress, thoughts appear that it would be better if you were not here, do not stay alone with them. Call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 in Slovenia (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans line Zaupni telefon Samarijan on 116 123 in Slovenia (24 hours). In an emergency call 112.

What psychotherapy can do

Psychotherapy will not pay off debts and will not draw up a financial plan. But it can help with what often stands in front of any good financial plan: understanding why you behave around money the way you do, and the conversations you do not dare to begin.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we see money as a language in which a family speaks about love, loyalty, guilt and power. Christian Gostečnik describes how unresolved emotional patterns from the family of origin repeat themselves in new relationships — and money is one of the areas where this is most clearly visible. When an athlete understands why it is so hard to say “no” to their father, or why they experience every purchase as proof, they can start setting boundaries that are not a rejection of the family but a way of caring for themselves.

Sometimes it makes sense for a couple or part of the family to come to a session. A conversation about who gave what, who expects what and who owes what to whom is often easier in a space where someone guides it safely. For those who want to look more deeply at family patterns, including those around money, there is a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, in which we draw the family together across three generations. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Exercise: my money story

You can do this exercise on your own, today. You need paper and about twenty minutes of quiet.

1. The first memory. Write down your earliest memory connected with money. Where were you, who was there, what did you feel?
2. Sentences from home. Write down three sentences about money that you often heard or sensed as a child, even if they were never spoken (“there’s never enough money”, “we don’t talk about that”, “we gave everything for you”).
3. The first big earnings. Remember what you did with the first larger sum you earned through sport. Who did you spend it on, and why?
4. Connect them. Look at whether there is a link between the sentences from home and what you did. Which sentence was making the decision for you back then?
5. One conversation. Choose one person you would like to talk to about this, and write down a single sentence you would use to begin that conversation. You do not have to say it today.

The exercise will not change your bank balance. But it can show that your decisions about money are not only yours — and that you can therefore look at them from a little distance. How hard it is to change habits even when we know we should I describe in Why change knocks us off balance, even when it is good change.

Where this piece does not reach

I would like to be clear about the limits.

This is not financial advice. For questions about saving, investments, taxes and contracts you need an independent financial professional, an accountant or a lawyer — ideally someone who is not also your friend, your relative or someone who earns from what they sell you. Therapy can help you begin such a conversation at all and hear yourself in it, but it does not replace it.

Not every money problem is psychological. Sometimes the problem is simply that the income was too low, the career too short or the injury too early. Then there is nothing wrong with your relationship to money — what is wrong is the circumstances. Here psychotherapy mainly helps make sure shame does not make the distress even greater.

Not every athlete is in distress. Many handle money thoughtfully, have good support and get through the transition after their career without major upheaval. This piece does not describe everyone, but those for whom something has got stuck.

When to go elsewhere. For work on performance and routines the right person is a sport psychologist; I am not a sport psychologist. If long-lasting low mood, insomnia or thoughts of suicide appear, turn to your GP or a psychiatrist. If betting or gambling is slipping out of control, it makes sense to seek out addiction specialists.

What to remember

• An athlete’s income often comes in waves and ends suddenly, while expectations and commitments remain.
• High earnings on their own do not protect against financial hardship after a career.
• In sport, money is almost always a family matter: it holds loyalty, guilt and invisible accounts.
• The beliefs about money we bring from home often decide more than knowledge of finance.
• Psychotherapy does not replace a financial professional, but it can help you understand the patterns and begin the conversations shame has shut down.