The growth of professional sports over the past few decades has also meant that athlete salaries have grown as well. The issue? Professional athletes fresh out of high school and college (most under the age of 22) are become overnight millionaires, and most lack the financial literacy to handle that adjustment. Surprising to most, a large percentage of professional athletes declare bankruptcy within a few years because of their inability to manage their finances. Nearly 16% of NFL players file for bankruptcy within 12 years of retirement and ESPN’s Broke looked at the prevalence of financial stress for professional athletes.
Abdullah Al-Bahrani and Darshak Patel have a great paper in the Southern Economic Journal that looks at using ESPN 30 for 30 to teach economics.