Footballers rarely used to make enough to attract conmen. When England’s Premier League began in 1992, the average player still earned “only” £77,000 a year. Twenty years later the figure was about £1.2m. Now footballers are fat targets. They go almost directly from school to earning millions.
Having money brings the burden of having to invest it. Mark Burke, an English ex-pro who played in several countries and has seen some peers ruined, told me that many non-footballers would also have made mistakes if they’d had £50,000 a week and endless temptations at 19. Every shark is hunting these young men. It’s not just players’ agents, financial advisers and wannabe girlfriends; there are estate agents who will take a footballer straight to the unsellable mansion with drainage problems beside the main road. Rebus reckons footballers put more than £1bn into mis-sold complex investment schemes in the past decade. Some were sold new schemes every year.
