A broken forearm ended one rugby league player’s career. Four operations failed to repair it, and he was told he would not play professionally again.
His career-ending policy cost around £800 a year. After a time excess of roughly six months, it paid out about £230,000. He later told Ant Brooking, the sports insurance specialist at All Sport Insurance Services who placed it, that without it he would probably have been bankrupt.
Few athletes are uninsured, Brooking said. The bigger gap is that they don’t know the limits of what they have, particularly when a club has arranged it.
“The distinction is, are you insured for the things that matter to you, or are you insured for the things that you need to be?”
The question he wants put to athlete clients far more often is what happens financially if they can never play again. Players are told what to eat, when to train and when to sleep, he said, and few think beyond those instructions unless someone prompts them.
Club policies are primarily designed to protect the club and its contractual obligations rather than the player’s financial position and their personal accident, medical and career-ending elements tend to be basic.
Medical cover, particularly lower down the football pyramid, often stretches to scans and diagnostics but not treatment. Even in the National League, where Brooking estimates all but two or three clubs are now full-time, players don’t necessarily get the protections seen in the top divisions.
League and association schemes can look more generous than they are. Some player associations and representative bodies provide personal accident or career-ending benefits, Brooking said, but these can carry relatively modest limits compared with a professional athlete’s earnings or the value of their remaining contract. In one scheme he cited, the sum insured was around £30,000 to £50,000. Players shouldn’t assume association-provided cover will protect their individual circumstances.
Brooking draws a firm line between income protection and career-ending cover. Income protection replaces earnings for a set period; the last product he saw had a two-week waiting period and benefits capped at around 90 days.
Career-ending cover pays a sum insured based on future earnings across the contract; younger players tend to pay less, while longer contracts support larger sums insured. Because it responds to an injury that permanently ends someone’s ability to play professionally, the wording and definition of a career-ending injury are crucial.
Underwriters price in detail. For cricketers, a bowler will typically pay a higher percentage of the sum insured than a batter of the same age, club and salary, because of the strain bowling puts on the back. Cover can also run 24/7 and worldwide, which matters because careers don’t only end on the pitch. Brooking has seen a claim pay out for a player who suffered a brain injury after diving into shallow water on an off-season holiday.
“Any athlete that doesn’t have their career-ending cover in place is gambling every time they go to training, every time they play.”
Home cover brings its own problems. Players’ movements are public, down to European away trips, making an empty house a target. Home underwriters also expect contents and valuables to sit in proportion and athletes’ watch collections, jewellery and art often don’t. Brooking gave the example of £30,000 of contents alongside £20,000 of jewellery.
“An insurer will look at that and go, that is imbalanced massively, we cannot cover this.”
Placing these risks means presenting each case to insurers individually. Some clients respond to the imbalance by inflating their contents sum insured to accommodate the valuables, Brooking said, paying far more than they need to.
A client with around £2 million of art in a house worth about £400,000, for example, could be better served by separate art cover alongside a standard home policy. He believes a major insurer offering a properly priced, sports-specific home product, built around safeguards such as alarms and safes, would find a ready market.
Education helps, Brooking said, but only to a degree when buying cover online is so easy. The consequences of buying unsuitable cover are particularly clear in motor. One 19-year-old professional footballer insured his car online as a student, which Brooking estimates saved him about £1,200. After a crash, his insurer quickly established his occupation. It paid the third party but declined his own-damage claim, leaving him with an £18,000 repair bill.
“Athletes really need to understand the difference between buying insurance and actually being insured.”
Brooking speaks to at least 10 to 15 athletes a year whose claims have been declined in similar circumstances. Comparison platforms want to cover grassroots players with ordinary day jobs, he said, so they cannot simply exclude everyone who plays football.
Online providers are subject to regulatory obligations, Brooking said, but he believes more emphasis is needed on making sure customers understand the assumptions, eligibility criteria and restrictions behind the policies they buy. Occupation-related conditions in particular can be lost in lengthy terms and conditions or accepted through a tick-box declaration without customers grasping their significance.
Across motor, home and career-ending cover, the adviser’s task starts with establishing what the athlete already has, who it protects and whether it would respond to the loss they could least afford.
