The consumption and saving behaviour of professional football players – looking into a socio-economic problem

Abstract

Unlike many top athletes in other Olympic sports, professional footballers in the first and second German football leagues generate disproportionately high incomes during their active sports careers. Due to these high incomes, it should be possible for players to save sufficient money during their sports career so that they can autonomously secure their lives afterwards. Despite their high incomes, however, not all players are able to build up sustainable assets. A study from the German players' union VDV shows that the surveyed players believe that about 20% of active professionals in Germany have financial problems regardless of the league that they play in, and they expect that every second player is threatened with financial problems after the end of his career. The paper aims to identify and systematically combine economic and sociological explanation mechanisms to analyse certain aspects of the saving and consumption behaviour of professional footballers. Finally, the methodological consequences for an empirical study are discussed and specific analytical units with research-guiding questions are derived.

Keywords:

• Professional football players
• consumption and saving behaviour
• football milieu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following Hayek (1949[1934], p. 548), saving is defined in line with the following elements: reference to the future, non-defined use, and an active decision to save money (i.e. deliberately foregoing cutting consumption). As a result, saving is understood as the conscious putting aside of money or investing it in financially solid objects and assets to secure the future (Wilke, 2010).

2 The concept of hyperbolic discounting represents an extension of the neoclassical “discounted utility” model, according to which temporal inconsistencies in the behavior of decision-makers are taken into account (see Ainslie & Haslam, 1992). The basic assumption of this concept is that people are impatient in the short term and therefore prefer certain decisions or behaviors (Beck, 2014).

3 The results obtained for German households imply that the reason for saving is usually the uncertainty with regard to future events. Furthermore, there is merely a very weak though significant correlation between "precautionary saving" and personal aversion to risk. The great significance of the motive "saving for unforeseen events" is most likely to be due to the subjects' "appreciation of the freedom of choice resulting from money" (Wilke, 2010, p. 71).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) under Grant number: 404929781.