Her husband [...] had been one of the most powerful ends that every played football at New Haven - a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.
- The Great Gatsby, p. 11
 |
| Party at Gatsby's, courtesy of Baz Luhrman. Gatsby/footballers can't afford zebras forever. (from hollywoodreporter.com ) |
I
learnt recently that Dennis Bergkamp is, due to his canny investments, the 500th
richest person in the Netherlands. He has an estimated personal
wealth of €55 million, making him the second-richest Dutch footballer, behind Ruud
Van Nistelrooy. In 2004, the BBC estimated his personal fortune at £37 million,
second only to David Beckham in the UK. At 2004 exchange rates (roughly 1.5 Euros to the Pound),
this means that his wealth hasn't changed value for seven years.
Which may not seem that impressive, but when you remember that he's
been retired for all of that period (although he does work as assistant
manager at Ajax, it seems unlikely that his salary there is
comparable to his salary at Arsenal) and that there has been a major
recession in the interim, Dennis is doing pretty well for himself.
Bergkamp's
successful wealth retention looks far better when compared to the
unfortunate case of Kenny Sansom. Sansom, who played for Arsenal for
eight seasons in the eighties, is England's second-most-capped
left-back of all time, after Ashley Cole. Recently, the Sun
revealed that Sansom was homeless, and struggling with alcohol and
gambling addictions. “I've
been living homeless for 10 days,” he said. “That's
because I've got no money, I'm a drunk, I'm feeling not very well and
I'm a gambler. I've been living on the street.”
The
fact is that the retired lives of most professional footballers are
far closer to Sansom's than Bergkamp's. The sporting charity Xpro
estimates that up to 60% of footballers face bankruptcy within five
years of retiring from the game. The chairman of the Professional
Footballers' Association, Gordon Taylor, disputes these figures,
claiming that bankruptcy rates are closer to 10%, but even this seems shockingly high for such a well-remunerated
profession. Bankruptcy is not at all unusual for athletes: for
example, Sports
Illustrated
estimate that “By the time they have been retired for two years,
78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial
stress because of joblessness or divorce.” There seems to be something about young athletic millionaires that
renders their wealth unstable.
In
the case of Kenny Sansom and others like him (Paul Gascoigne comes to
mind), the shortcomings are very obvious. Addictions like alcohol,
gambling and cocaine can be ruinous to a player's bank-balance.
Indeed, ex-pros may be especially vulnerable to these kinds of
dependencies. Football has long had a culture of drinking in the
dressing rooms as well as on the terraces. Worse, it has had a macho
attitude that has disdained asking for help or admitting you have a
problem. I suspect that footballers, due to the stress and prominence
of their positions, and the deflating effect of such early
retirement, may be unusually predisposed towards addiction, and the
culture around them exacerbates this predisposition.
Football
culture can be toxic in other ways. It's most obvious problem is
extravagant, short-term expenditure. The Secret Footballer, for
example, describes a night out in Las Vegas. Two groups of
footballers are enjoying $5,000 minimum spend tables at TAO. Their
“fixer” has arranged for high class prostitutes for the evening.
When one particularly attractive call-girl appears, the Secret
Footballer's table is outbid by the one behind, who offer to double
the girls' fees. This financial humiliation provokes a "champagne
war," where each side continues to gift one another bottles of
champagne until one party can no longer pay. The eventual bar bill is
“$130,000, excluding tip”. None of the players are going to see this money again, and none of
them will be able to spend like this when they stop earning.
Such
decadence is common-place, appearing weekly in our tabloids. Liam
Ridgewell used £20 notes as toilet paper. Mario Balotelli commissioned a statue of himself. The QPR team, on a winter 'training camp' in Dubai, took the
opportunity to party: “We had all day to ourselves. That meant
shopping, the pool, nightclubs. We were on holiday, it was just a
party. Some
of the bar bills were enormous, huge, in the tens of thousands of
pounds for one night. Two
or three players couldn’t train the next day. It was that bad.”
Such
spending is wasteful and likely to facilitate an addictive lifestyle.
It is also completely unsustainable. Sports
Illustrated
quote American money-manager Michael
Seymour:
athletes buy $20,000 watches, "but
if they invested in a five percent, Triple A insured, tax-free
municipal bond for a period of 30 years that $20,000 would be worth
$86,000 at that tax-free rate of return. And needless to say, they
buy more than one $20,000 Rolex." What footballers fail to understand is that they are spending not
just their current salary, but their future salary as well.
Furthermore,
when players do try to invest their money wisely, they often make
poor choices. This is mostly because they lack the interest and
education necessary to manage a multi-million pound portfolio. There
is a reason wealth-fund managers are so well paid. Managing large
amounts of money is a skill, and it is not one taught in football
academies, where subjects like basic maths, let alone risk management
or economics, are mostly off the curriculum by 14 or 15. Simply
speaking, footballers don't know how to use their money, and earn it
so early in their lives that they never even have experience of
managing their own budgets or of slowly scaling up their wealth.
Asking a footballer to manage £20 million is like asking a ten-year-old to play in a Champions League match: they might be able to do it
eventually, but they aren't prepared for it right now.
Footballers'
financial naïvety
is more often neglected or exploited by advisers than it is
mitigated. Agents will try and
take as much money as they can from a player. Many agents are not
even professionals, but just the friends or family members of the
players, with no expertise to justify their position. Such hangers on
are potentially incapable of giving good advice even if they wanted
to. Friends and contacts take the opportunity of a player's success
to make some money themselves. The baseball player Torii Hunter gives
an illuminating example (again in Sports
Illustrated).
Hunter looked at the financial statements of a teammate: "It
turns out he was paying this guy [his financial adviser, an
acquaintance from the old days in the Dominican Republic] $5,000 a
month on insurance for two cars in the Dominican Republic,"
Hunter says. "I got three cars, and I only pay $250 a month.
He'd been with and trusted this guy [for almost 18 years]!"
Given that athletes are so vulnerable to exploitation from their own friends and
family, it is no surprise that they are targeted by professional
fraudsters. A particularly interesting case is that of Luigi DiFonzo,
an author, convict, con artist, businessman, FBI snitch and pretend
Italian count. DiFonzo “looked like a pimp”, according to his
attorney, and served a three-year sentence for defrauding a dead
friend's widow out of her $120,000 inheritance. In 1996 he founded a
company called DFA Italia to defraud potential investors. DiFonzo
would particularly target athletes because they were highly visible
and easily trickable millionaires. He even recruited a former
pro-football player, Duval Love, as a salesman to make the pitch
easier to other athletes. To add to his allure, he posed as a member
of the Italian nobility. He and his crew laundered the fraud-money
through the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas to reduce the
paperwork; presumably the gambling milieu
provided both the glamour DiFonzo craved and a welcome pool of
potential investors. (All DiFonzo information from here.)
DiFonzo's
writing partner, Jesse
Kornbluth, described him as a “Sicilian Gatsby”. I find the image curiously poignant. Gatsby is a fantasist, a triumph
of delusion over reality. “Gatsby,
who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there
was something gorgeous about him” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 8 (London: Penguin, 2000; fist published 1926)). Gatsby, who money-voiced Daisy can never love; Gatsby, whose riches
diffuse with drops of his blood in his unused swimming-pool.
Gatsby
is an apt symbol for our bankrupt athletes. He and they were never
meant to be rich, born in deprived areas and parachuted like lottery
winners into the dangerous lives of multimillionaires. To lament the
problems of the ultra-rich may seem churlish, but it doesn't mean
they don't have problems. Footballers can all too often be gross
caricatures of modern consumer capitalism, wasting money without
Gatsby's elegance or pretensions. Their lives can be nasty, brutish
and short. It is this brevity that gives it poignancy. They only earn
for, at most, twenty years, but they insist on living as if the
present will last forever. Perhaps they have to, to avoid thinking
about a bleak retirement. A retirement
where they will face constant scams and the worst faces of society. A
retirement where their standard of living will, mostly likely,
sharply decline, and where the temptations of powders and potions may
prove too strong to resist. A retirement where they will no longer be able to do the only thing they know how to do well.
The
saddest thing of all, however, is that their wealth is not the only
thing that fades. The single biggest factor in athletes' bankruptcy
is divorce. Divorce rates are between 60% and 80%. The diminishing lifestyle faced by a post-retirement lack of income
tends to cause and exacerbate problems in relationships. For too
many, the end of the good life is also the end of their love life.
“They
were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and
creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made” (Gatsby, p. 170). Footballers cannot retreat into their own carelessness. The money
runs out and they can't replace it. It's been wasted away, on
champagne and hookers, yachts and skis, depreciating properties and
bad investments. Worse, it's been taken away, by parents and agents,
brothers and brokers, wives and children. I find it hard to blame
these men for their plight. They were never ready for their wealth,
never prepared, never capable. The misery they suffer is the result
of a system that ceases to care when they leave the pitch, of clubs
and businessmen more interested in trophies than pension plans, and
of a culture that overvalues material success over education,
ephemerality over sustainability.
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