‘I was fed up of seeing mates ripped off’

Well before Bryan Robson was the beating heart of Manchester United’s midfield, three serious injuries led some to question whether he was too injury prone to make it as a professional footballer.

Robson broke his left leg twice and cracked his right ankle playing for West Bromwich Albion. He was just 20 years old. These days, a player of his promise would already be a millionaire, though perhaps accustomed to a level of spending too great to retire.

But in 1977, that wasn’t how football worked. This was before television money transformed the English top flight into the most marketable club football competition in the world. Before youth players could earn serious money on promise alone. 

As Captain Marvel — his nickname as a player — pulls up in a Mercedes outside a hotel not far from his family home in Altrincham, I wonder how his financial outlook was influenced by potentially career-threatening injuries and later a big-money deal (at the time) to join Man United in 1981 for £1.5mn, then the British transfer record. 

The Baggies offered him £1,000 (basic) a week to stay, a “fabulous offer for those days”, he once recalled. United doubled it. Adjusted for inflation, that’s worth around £7,425 a week in today’s money. 

Today’s elite players command hundreds of thousands a week. These high net worth individuals are highly sought after as clients. Courted by advisers, football agents, wealth managers and crypto bros, the modern player has a dizzying number of choices to make when it comes to making their money work — or not.

Now arguably United’s most senior ambassador since the death of Sir Bobby Charlton last year, Robson wants to use his profile to protect the next generation through a new venture to demystify financial planning and investments for the uninitiated.

This is why he became a director and shareholder of High Performance Individuals, a company founded with former United youth player Simon Andrews, who left football for a career in insurance and later joined wealth manager St James’s Place. 

“The reason I wanted to be involved is because I was fed up of seeing mates . . . in the media all the time . . . bankrupt and making bad decisions,” Robson tells me. People had “ripped them off”, he says, for hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of pounds.

Robson, born in County Durham, north east England, and raised in council housing, overcame his injuries and, obviously, never activated his back-up plan of becoming a PE instructor. He prioritised financial security early in his career, “sacrificing a car” to save a deposit on a two-bedroom flat for £18,000 in Great Barr as a youth player at West Brom, according to his autobiography. 

Until his departure in 1994, Robson scored 99 goals in 461 appearances. United fans revere him for his inspirational performances in a decade dominated by arch-rivals Liverpool. Two league titles came in his final two seasons at United. Only nine England players have more than the 90 caps he collected from 1980 to 1991. He captained his country 65 times. 

Lesser players now make multiples of what Robson earned in his playing days. But some things never change. Young, single football players are easy targets, partly because they’re inexperienced, living away from home, or, as Robson wrote in his autobiography, they have “a lot of time on their hands and money in their pockets”. 

HPI isn’t just for young players. Robson says it was “unbelievable how many players just didn’t understand basic tax or benefit in kind . . . thinking they were going to pay ridiculous fees for hiring cars or leasing cars”. He says there are similar problems in boxing, rugby and horseracing.

Horror stories are everywhere. Scams. Failed investments. Gambling. Messy divorces. Bankruptcies. The list goes on. Robson had his share of dud deals, including a hotel that didn’t exist and supposedly tax-efficient schemes for film productions. 

So why do high-performing athletes, who know too well that there are no shortcuts that beat hard work and gradual gains on the pitch, fall for promises of overnight financial success?

“It doesn’t matter what people say, there’s certain backgrounds, the areas you come from, the schools you go to, maybe the education isn’t very good,” Robson says. “If you haven’t been educated well but you’re a great footballer, then you need to try to pick that up.”

In many ways, modern-day players are far less accessible than the men who used to frequent pubs and travel with journalists to games. So how do unscrupulous types make contact?

“There’s the regulated world and the unregulated world,” says Andrews. “The unregulated world is probably bigger than the regulated world right now. Things like property, cryptocurrency, a lot of these products can be marketed via social media, so there’s so many more touch points now than there were historically to get to players.”

Robson, who got on the property ladder as a young player on the advice of senior West Brom teammates, says players still bounce ideas around the dressing room, including some “crazy, crazy stuff”. Andrews recalls that on one recent visit to a professional club, Robson became “animated” when he overheard chatter about the possibility of putting money into mystery “containers”.  

“You don’t even know what you’re buying,” Robson laments. “You’re buying the container, you haven’t got a clue what’s inside the container. It was a mate of one of the young lads. It’s incidents like that where the kids have got to be so careful.”

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As English football left the 1980s behind, Robson had already cemented his status as a legend of the game. 

The elusive league title came in 1993, with Robson scoring the winner in the last game of the season against Wimbledon. This was the Premier League era. Sky money poured in as Rupert Murdoch revolutionised the sport.

Premier League clubs generated £205mn of revenue that season and paid £97mn in wages. By 2021-22, those figures had ballooned to £5.4bn and £3.6bn, respectively. 

The competition went global as United racked up league titles and added the Champions League as part of the “treble” in 1999. Robson had long left the club. He earned more in a year as manager of Middlesbrough than his annual salary as a player.

By contrast, Andrews’ aspirations in the game had already fizzled out. The former United apprentice ended his professional football career at Wigan Athletic, then a lowly third division side. 

Andrews quit football for life assurance and in 1998 joined St James’s Place Wealth Management, where he remained for 20 years. He set up HPI after a stint at Tilney Group, where clients included sportspeople and high net worth families.

The aim is to provide guidance to high performers in the sports, media and entertainment sectors as they try to navigate the complexity of working in what can be a relatively shortlived career, with financial ups and downs.  

“We’re not telling the individual what to do. We are giving them a report with our recommendations and it’s up to them either to dismiss it or to take it forward,” Robson says. “It’s the player who’s going to make his own decision on the report.”

HPI, a for-profit company, isn’t regulated because it doesn’t give advice on where to invest. “We don’t do that. We would just typically say, ‘You need a financial planner or you need to meet a tax specialist,’” says Andrews. “The key difference with HPI is we don’t take money from the providers; we just charge the client for our mentoring and business management service.”

At a time when his former employer, St James’s Place, has been under regulatory scrutiny over its charges, HPI publishes its fees on its website. The company charges a flat fee for its lifestyle and financial review, ranging from £500 for its basic service to £2,000 for clients with “highly complex” needs. There are also four tiers of charges for ongoing support, ranging from £3,000 to £24,300 a year.

However, elite players have the pick of wealth managers and financial advisers specialising in managing money for athletes. Football leagues and players unions organise workshops for young players to help them get to grips with their finances.

Uefa, the sport’s European governing body, offers an online course for players who want to get to grips with “cash management, credit, savings and investments”. It also provides “a comprehensive introduction to entrepreneurship”. 

Another challenge for HPI is to make inroads with players’ gatekeepers, namely the inner circle of family, friends and football agents who represent the stars of the game. Privately, some agents are defensive about their position but HPI wants to work with them “to help advise the kids”, says Robson.

“For me it’s important that people are warned before they finish their career and try and get something substantial behind them, especially a house,” Robson says, “because if you finish your career and you haven’t got a mortgage and you’ve got a property, that’s quite a nice feeling.”