Digital engagement for professional footballers

The problem

Professional footballers have an enormous potential earnings range, combined with a very short window of opportunity in which to maximise those earnings. Players typically retire in their 30s, and can take pension income from 35.

Many professional players are not able to visualise the scope of change after retirement, or how long they might need to draw down income from an investment gathered over a short time.

The process

Working with retired professionals, we workshopped scenarios and outcomes.

The collaborative approach we take, which involves representative users from both the consumer and adviser spaces, means that we are able to ensure our definition of the problem includes business drivers, personal drivers and regulatory factors.

We were able to identify a close fit with our Digital Client Engagement tools which can easily be configured to meet the needs of differing customers and the markets that they serve.

The solution

Implement Focus' Digital Client Engagement (DCE) tools.

Focus' DCE is a set of independent education and engagement tools that sit around a core hub and allow users to discover financial needs, envision their impact, experience the value of resolving them and take action, either accompanied by an adviser or in a self-serve model.

For the PFA, we set pension incomes to be available from 35 and configured the default set of personas within the tools to better represent the 3 major life stages of professional players, including age, expenditures, incomes, existing provisions and so on.

The impact

Players, who testing shows most commonly interact with this type of content on their phones whilst travelling, are now able to go through a guided process which exposes the different areas of concern that each player might have, shows how those concerns can be addressed and allows the player to book in with ProSport for a personal planning session.

All of the fact-find data collected during the initial interactions, which use a gamified approach to provoke data entry without it feeling intrusive, is passed to ProSport, along with the player's name and PFA ID.

2024 update

Extension

Financial education and support for players has recently transitioned from the PFA to a new charitable body called The Players Foundation. The Foundation and ProSport approached Focus to create a next-generation version of the original tools for 2024.