When even international stars such as former England goalkeeper David James are declared bankrupt it should make young soccer players, suddenly flush with mind-boggling riches, sit up and take notice of the perils that lie ahead.
James, who won 53 caps for England and lifted the 2007-2008 FA Cup with Portsmouth earning an estimated £20 million (US$26 million) during his career, is an example Peter Fairchild of City of London firm Smith&Williamson likes to use.
He and his colleagues make presentations to young players about planning their finances for the day they retire.
Photo: AFP
Fairchild said that clubs, beginning with Liverpool in 2012, had warmed to their ideas.
“We [the clubs said] want to grab their attention and shock the boys,” said Fairchild, after Agence France-Presse was given rare access to a session with second-tier side Queens Park Rangers at their training ground west of London.
“So for once they have to get off their mobile phones and social media and take note of what people are saying, because there is a long-term benefit for their lives and it affects them,” he said.
“‘Use some real-life case studies,’ they told us,” Fairchild said. “Quite often the guys have their heroes on the screen and when they see them they go: ‘They are bankrupt? They can’t be.’ To which I reply it is the case and please, please take heed. Don’t fall into the traps they did and seek advice so you get it right from the start.”
According to XPro, which helps players plan for their lives after they hang up their boots, two in five soccer players go bankrupt within five years of retirement.
“It is a great shock when you see the big names like David James,” under-23 central defender Alex Finney said.
“I mean they were the top 1 percent of people who made it in football, it is a scary thought that people like them can have nothing at the end of it,” Finney said. “It is an eye-opener for the boys in that it warns you be ready for what life can hold for you.”
Fairchild said the players’ presentations are free.
“In dealing with experienced clients and established players we found too often, despite their sizeable earnings, their financial affairs were not in the apple-pie order you necessarily might think,” he said.
“When we dug under the surface we found a whole host of reasons: Wrong advice, wrong people involved with the wrong motivation for dealing with players,” he added.
Finney, whose path took him from Leyton Orient to Bolton Wanderers and then Queens Park Rangers, with whom he has agreed a new one-year contract, concurs.
“I am quite an open-minded person and I understand everyone wants to make money off the back of others, and not a lot of people want to make it off themselves,” said Finney, whose mother is an accountant and looks after his tax affairs. “People have tried to approach me. I know people who have been approached by a ‘salesman’ with a great pitch and lost money. You have to have your eyes open the whole time.”
Fairchild can recite any number of horror stories from the sport, although they are not all doom and gloom.
There was a member of Manchester United’s treble-winning squad in 1999 who lost a fortune through gambling and not paying taxes — he excuses it by saying he was the pauper of the squad at £60,000 a week.
On the other side, there is a recently retired former England international who during his playing career built up an impressive property portfolio.
For Finney it is crucial to have someone reliable, with the expertise to manage whatever assets he might earn in the future.
“I asked the investment management expert [Michael Saunders] what his background was — not out of a lack of respect — because I don’t want to trust someone with my money if they don’t have a background in managing other people’s money and lack the understanding of the service I want,” he said.
“However, this [session] was useful as they are a third party, an independent voice neither involved in the football side or the politics,” he added.
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to