We’re used to hearing stories about very highly paid athletes running out of money . Reportedly, more than half of professional basketball and football players run out of money a few years after their careers end. To deal with this problem, the NFL Players Association announced in a news release “that it is expanding its financial education program for players and former players.” The part of the news release that struck me the most was the following result of an effort to get players to save: “The results were groundbreaking, with over 1,000 players participating in the program, most engaging on an ongoing basis, and 48% saving at least 20% of their annual earnings in preparation for a potential lockout in 2011 based on the results of a lockout preparedness assessment.” With a league minimum salary of $375,000 in 2011 , it’s painfully obvious to me that saving only 20% of income is far too low. And this was achieved by only 48% of players who participated in a program. Furth...

The Toronto Star reported that the Ottawa Senators Hockey team claim they will go out of business if companies can no longer write off 50% of ticket costs . I’m a hockey fan, but I’m not a fan of giving professional sports teams tax breaks. When it comes to the financial side of sports, the fan base in one city is in competition with the fan bases in other cities. To see that this is true, we start with the fact that players move around. To the extent that players can move to new teams, the market for player salaries is similar from one team to the next. Poor teams have to pony up close to as much for a given player as other teams are willing to pay for him. This means that all teams face similar costs if they want to compete. Teams that do a better job of evaluating talent can get better players more cheaply (think Moneyball ), but this is the exception rather than the rule. All teams that want to compete face similar costs whether they have a large and rich fan base or a sm...