NIL widens the Atlantic divide in athlete wealth management

Name, image and likeness (NIL) has driven a new wedge between the sports worlds of North America and Europe. The NCAA began permitting college athletes to monetize their personal brands in 2021, setting into the hands of babes a firehose of revenue not unlike that of professional athletes. The result for many has been bankruptcy.

The figures on this are contested, but the direction is not. According to JPMorganChase, fewer than 2 percent of NCAA athletes turn professional, most professional athletes retire before the age of 35, and 65 percent report having had no financial education. According to Xpro, a welfare charity for former professional footballers, 40 to 60 percent of Premier League players declare bankruptcy within five years of retirement. The players’ union (PFA) sets the same figure at 10 to 20 percent.

The methods behind these estimates remain unpublished, but no matter. The cases are numerous, the pattern consistent, and there exists an actual welfare charity for pro footballers.

The best athletes are indeed given a firehose of income to hold, and most have dug no channel for all that water. All too soon, with age or injury, the hose goes dry and the water’s run off and evaporated.

The Old World

The institutional response in Europe remains largely that of the unions – the PFA provides financial planning advice and a lifetime education allowance of £7,500 (€8,650) per member – and the agents, with their conflicts of interest. Little else has arisen.

The likely reason is NIL, whose introduction in America was a regulatory event. A new and numerous class of earners suddenly needed financial infrastructure. American banks had a product hook and a marketing opportunity. Europe has so far seen nothing of the kind.

The New World

JPMorganChase is the latest bank to have entered this market. Its proposal, made on March 18, comes in two parts: the Athlete Council and the Athlete Center of Excellence (ACE).

The Council’s members include the NBA’s Dwyane Wade (chair) and Jalen Brunson, the NFL’s Tom Brady and Kayvon Thibodeaux, the WNBA’s A’ja Wilson and Sue Bird, the NWSL’s Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, and Peloton instructor Ally Love. These present and former pros meet periodically with the executives of JPMorgan Wealth Management. As the name suggests – and the names suggest – the Council is advisory rather than operational and no doubt intended to give the initiative an aura of success.

ACE is the product itself, available through chase.com. It maps careers into three stages: student athletes (NIL), professional athletes (peak earnings) and fading athletes (retirement). Each stage gets downloadable checklists, articles and access to JPMorgan advisors, some of them former athletes. A minimum of $25,000 invested gains the athlete access to one of these advisors. The product, then, lies in retail-to-mass-affluent territory, not private wealth.

ACE is accessible, structured and designed to engage with athletes where the problem starts, at the college level. That said, its educational content is what any competent planner would provide for a fee.

The competition

Morgan Stanley is the incumbent, having established a division called Global Sports & Entertainment (GSE) in 2014. GSE employs more than 300 directors, has sat on the NFLPA’s list of approved advisors since 2020 (having been providing NFLPA members with financial advice since 2002) and has for the past dozen years enjoyed a relationship with the NFL Senior Bowl, providing financial education to draft prospects. It is positioned in traditional private wealth: a dedicated advisor coordinates with the client’s CPAs and attorneys and helps manage buying, borrowing, investing and estate planning.

GSE’s clients include athletes, entertainers, e-sports players and coaches. Morgan Stanley has no council of celebrities, no doubt because it can advertise its institutional relationships.

About a year ago Morgan Stanley entered into a partnership with TheLinkU, an NIL platform established in 2022.

Goldman Sachs has set up a different structure, quietly. In November 2025 it acquired a majority stake in Excel Sports Management, at a valuation of about $1 billion. Among Excel’s 750 or so clients are golf’s Tiger Woods, the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark and the NBA’s Nikola Jokić. Rather than build a curriculum in finance or credential advisors, Goldman has bought its way into the athlete relations through representation. It is helping to negotiate the contracts that adjust the firehose’s blast. With Excel as a distribution channel, Goldman can cross-sell wealth management, tax structuring and investment advisory services to an extant, qualified client base. Though less scalable than JPMorgan’s, Goldman’s model is high in margin and owns the funnel.

Merrill Lynch decided to educate not the athlete but the banker. After all, a firehose is not your everyday hose.

To this end it worked with the College for Financial Planning (Centennial, Colorado; part of Kaplan, the educational publisher) to develop the curriculum for a new credential: that of the Sports & Entertainment Accredited Wealth Management Advisor (SE-AWMA), introduced in May 2021.

This was purportedly the first such college credential, and it was offered to Merrill Lynch’s advisors alone until May 2022. The first-mover advantage has long since vanished. The College owns and administers the SE-AWMA.

UBS, finally, launched its Athletes and Entertainers Strategic Client Segment in 2020. Like Morgan Stanley’s GSE, UBS’s initiative is on the list of NFLPA-approved advisors. Its public profile, though, is lower.

The Atlantic divide

In short, the opening that NIL has created in North America has no equivalent in Europe, and no European bank seems yet to have filled the niche that does exist. The closest institutional analogue is Arbuthnot Latham, a London private bank founded in 1833, which maintains a sports, media and entertainment practice and counts former Manchester United and England midfielder Michael Carrick among its named clients. It is founded on relationships, small and quiet – nothing like a mass-market product with a celebrity council.

In North America banks have stepped up to help make athletes financially literate and, of course, secure assets under management for themselves. In Europe unions and agents have been doing some of this work piecemeal.

The PFA is the world’s oldest professional sports union and is making genuine efforts, but a lifetime education allowance of £7,500 is not wealth management, and its constituency is English football alone. Agents have their structural, irresolvable conflicts of interest.

The firehose gushes, at least for a little while, and the European water evaporates.