NFL Moves to Online, Digital and Virtual Financial Literacy Solutions

The story of professional athletes making bad investments, overspending, and ending up in bankruptcy has become all too common over the years and professional sports teams and leagues have been relatively slow to develop and implement products, services and resources that could best support athletes in making better informed decisions about their personal financial affairs.

Following years of increasingly intensified advocacy for greater financial education solutions for professional athletes, financial literacy professionals are applauding moves by the National Football League to provide more support to current and former players to enhance their overall financial health. Among the more notable developments of the NFL’s approach is the league’s focus on new channels to educate the players, including online, digital and virtual technologies.

One of the latest examples is this week’s announcement by the San Francisco 49ers that it will be offering current and former team members access to the information, tools and resources of robo-advisor Wealthfront, an online education and investing platform. Rather than getting information from a single financial advisor, which often comes with that advisor’s intended or unintended biases and potentially more limited information, the Wealthfront solutions is designed as a portal to an expansive range of resources with the goal of best educating professional athletes regarding investing, saving, budgeting and other important aspects of managing their financial lives. To entice players to move towards this web-based offering, the 49ers have decided to pay the advisory fees on up to $100,000 in assets invested in a Wealthfront account.

Industry observers contend that the digital and virtual nature of Wealthfront’s approach should address the issues stemming from financial advisors who pitch professional athletes on financial schemes that the players don’t understand and that often are riddled with elements that enrich the financial advisors while further strapping the athletes in debt or other financial stress.

The NFL also is extending its focus on web-based, digital and virtual solutions for financially educating youth through its partnership with VISA, as they are broadening their national financial education campaign. VISA and the NFL developed and rolled out their Financial Football program in more than forty U.S. states since the program’s inception, with more initiatives on the near-term horizon.

To the extent the NFL’s move to digital financial literacy solutions show measurable success, many financial educators say it will serve as a model for other professional sports leagues as a foundation upon which current and former players can better understand and manage their personal financial affairs.