And so my brain’s wonkiest pleasure centers lit up recently when an economist friend emailed me a PDF that bills itself as a new, “comprehensive” study of that very issue. What I wasn’t expecting was for the study — in the course of selling itself to the public — to train its sights on me.
Presenting the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Working Paper No. 21085, “Bankruptcy Rates Among NFL Players with Short-Lived Income Spikes.” The researchers who put it together used Pro-Football-Reference.com to compile a list of 2,016 players who were drafted by NFL teams between 1996 and 2003. They then gave that list to a third-party service,1 asking it to search for recorded addresses that matched those names, and had another service scan for bankruptcy filings that fit both the names and the addresses.
The study’s big finding: Of the 471 draftees2 who had been retired for at least 12 years, 74, or 15.7 percent, had filed for bankruptcy by year 12.
It’s worth mentioning, for the uninitiated, that NBER working papers have not yet been peer reviewed.3 As the preamble to FiveThirtyEight’s In the Papers series perpetually explains, the papers’ “conclusions are preliminary (and occasionally flat-out wrong).” But as crude as the methodology of this particular study may be, it does seem to be a useful analysis of a defined subset of NFL draftees. Had the paper existed back when I reported that 2009 SI article on how and why athletes lose their money, I would’ve added it — caveats included — to the depressingly brief roll call of academic research in this field.
And that’s why one of the paper’s other prominent findings, as announced in a note from the authors, was so jarring to read. “The result of our comprehensive research on bankruptcy risk among NFL players,” they wrote, “is quite different from a widely-cited Sports Illustrated article, which reported that 78 percent of former NFL players are bankrupt or under ‘financial stress’ within two years of retirement (Torre, 2009). After 2 years of retirement, only about 1.9 percent of players in our sample have filed for bankruptcy.”