For Professional Athletes, Retirement Is a New Beginning 

Hanging it up ain’t easy. 

Retirement is usually thought of as something older workers go through, but it’s also a fact of life for professional athletes no longer at the top of their game. As with workers in more typical fields, pro athletes seldom have complete control over when they’re forced to hang it up, and they can struggle to find a footing while searching for the next step. The only real solution to an early retirement, for elite athletes and otherwise, is to plan ahead and save for the future while the paychecks are still coming in. 

Matthew LaPorta, executive-in-residence at Dynasty Financial Partners, has lived these dynamics, having found sporting success as a Major League Baseball player and Olympian. Leaving the game behind in 2014 wasn’t easy, LaPorta told Retirement Upside, but he has since found a great deal of meaning in wealth management. 

“When you retire from a sport that you love, it’s like a piece of you dies in the process,” LaPorta said. “You have to ask big questions about what comes next. For pro athletes who made it to major sports leagues like the NFL, NBA or MLB, the hardest part of the athlete-to-investor transition usually isn’t access to capital. It’s recalibrating what performance means.”

Peak Performance 

On the field, performance is immediate. It’s delivered under pressure, on a schedule and in front of everyone. Investing and capital allocation for a retired pro runs on the opposite logic. 

“Where many athletes get the transition wrong is treating capital as the scoreboard,” LaPorta said. “The real goal is to build a durable portfolio with assets that compound and risks that are understood.”

Retiring athletes are used to finding success by making big plays, but with investing, bigger bets usually aren’t better moves. Instead, LaPorta said, success means building a structure in which accumulated capital does patient, deliberate work long after the playing career end.

“A lot of the work we need to do as an advisor is helping people cut through the noise,” he said. “Successful athletes are constantly being pitched on investment ideas, and they see people posting on social media about big venture capital deals and private investments. You can end up with shiny object syndrome.”

Even for athletes with high base salaries, it pays to be prudent: 

• A study published in Population Research and Policy Review found a mean career length of 5.6 years for Major League players. 
• Because a small number of superstars play for 15 to 20 years and skew the mathematical mean upward, the median career length is closer to two to three years.

Reinvesting in Sport. Many athletes are drawn to investments that involve sports in some capacity, and LaPorta says they should lean into that. “There’s a ton of opportunity there,” he said. “Sports are a broadening asset ecosystem, with opportunities from professional franchises down to youth sports, athlete brands and infrastructure.”