I played professional tennis until 2020. I know what a compressed earning window feels like from the inside, and I know how little of the financial advice aimed at athletes is written by anyone who has lived one.
Football, tennis and golf pay well, for a limited number of years. Peak earning typically runs from the early twenties into the early thirties, with golf often extending further. Whatever the sport, the pattern is the same: a short, high-income period followed by several decades in which that income no longer arrives.
The plan has to cover the longer period, not the shorter one. Most do not.
The four phases
Peak earning
A compressed window. What happens to income in these years decides most of what follows.
Protection
Injury, contract risk and currency. The years where what you keep matters more than what you make.
Transition
Income stops before life does. The hardest adjustment, and the one least planned for.
Post-career
Several decades funded by a period that lasted eight to fifteen years.
Why standard advice falls short
Most financial guidance is written for someone with one employer, one country and one currency. Very few athletes fit that description for long.
Steady income, a single tax residency, a retirement age around 65, and decades to compound quietly.
Volatile income, transfers and tours across jurisdictions, and a career that can end in a season.
I advise internationally mobile clients across eleven jurisdictions. Athletes are the most cross-border clients there are.
The prize money stops the day you stop competing. The plan built around it shouldn’t.
Seven costly plays
The same patterns, repeated across football, tennis and golf, regardless of league, ranking or tour. None of them is a failure of intelligence. Every one is a failure of timing, and all of them are avoidable with enough notice.
Spending as if peak income is permanent
Lifestyle expands to match the best year. The costs stay when the earnings do not.
Outsourcing decisions to unqualified people
Family, friends and informal advisers take on financial control without the expertise.
Ignoring tax residency across countries and tours
Transfers, tour schedules and relocations shift tax exposure, often invisibly.
No plan for injury or a sudden career end
Insurance and contingency income get treated as optional, until they are the only thing standing between a career and a crisis.
Over-concentration in property
Real estate feels safe and tangible, so it quickly absorbs far more of the balance sheet than it should.
No structure around relationship or divorce risk
Wealth built during a career rarely gets the legal structuring high earners elsewhere take for granted.
Waiting until retirement to think about "after"
By the final match, tournament or round, the window to build what comes next has often already narrowed.
What I actually help with
An athlete is a cross-border client before anything else. Multiple countries, multiple currencies, a residency position that changes with every transfer, and exit taxation when you move. That is the work I do every day — it simply arrives more intensely, and on a shorter clock, in professional sport.
- Residency and tax across tours and transfers: where you are actually resident, what each jurisdiction can tax, and how treaties apply to prize money, salary and image rights.
- Structuring the earning years: holding income in a form that survives the move to the next club, the next country and the next currency.
- Protection: injury and career-end cover treated as a foundation rather than an afterthought.
- Building the post-career balance sheet: a portfolio designed to fund thirty or forty years, not to look impressive during ten.
- Succession and family: what happens to it, and what protects it, if circumstances change.
The Athlete’s Wealth Playbook
29 pages on protecting, growing and enjoying what you earn — written for internationally mobile players. Tell me where to send it and it arrives immediately.