For many football stars, money goes just as quickly as it comes. According to stats, nearly 4 out of 5 former NFL players either go bankrupt or suffer severe financial distress within two years of retirement.
Some fall of this players fall prey to bad financial dealers or investment scams, and others are generous to a fault. Many lose it by spending it as soon as they get their hands on it.
1. Andre Rison
Wide receiver Andre Rison was drafted in the first round in 1989 and played for seven teams, mostly with Atlanta, over the course of 12 years. He won a Super Bowl with the Green Bay Packers, he was named All-Pro once, and he went to five Pro Bowls. Over the course of his career, he earned more than $19.17 million on the field alone. In 2007, Andre Rison declared bankruptcy.
2. Clinton Portis
He was a productive running back who played with Denver and Washington, Clinton Portis amassed nearly 6,000 yards in his first four seasons. According to Sports Illustrated, Portis committed the classic NFL sins of making bad investments and trusting the wrong people, but they were people he had every reason to trust. Portis lost $3.1 million when they convinced him to invest in an Alabama casino that went bust.
3. Vince Young
Quarterback Vince Young played for only six seasons but he was selected for the Pro Bowl twice. Drafted in the first round in 2006, he spent all but the final year of his career in Tennessee before moving to Philadelphia. In 2014, just one year after the Packers decided that Young’s troubles were greater than his remaining potential, he filed for bankruptcy. His assets combined for as little as $500,001 and his debts totaled as much as $10 million.
4. Raghib (Rocket) Ismail
In 1991, wide receiver Raghib (Rocket) Ismail was a junior at Notre Dame and the presumed No. 1 draft pick when he shocked the world and signed with the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts instead. The reason was simple. The Canadian league offered him a guaranteed $18.2 million for four years, a contract that at the time was the biggest in the history of football, according to Sports Illustrated. As early as 1991 — the year he was drafted as a college junior — Ismail “invested” $300,000 in a Hard Rock Cafe knockoff restaurant called the Rock N’ Roll Cafe. He never saw any of the money again and never found out what became of the restaurant. He dumped another large but undisclosed sum into the production of a religious-themed movie, another into a failed music label, another into an emerging cosmetological treatment, another into a phone card dispenser venture and finally a string of custom-calligraphy shops.
5. Dermontti Dawson
