Open Mic: Retirement in Professional Sports

To retire or not to retire? This certainly seems to be the question for many professional athletes these days.   Brett Favre has struggled with the question for at least three years now and still doesn’t seem to have found a good answer.    Since I currently work in the retirement business, I have some additional insight to add on the Brett Favre saga and the retirement of athletes in general.    In the business world, both the company and the employee have a lot of say as to when an employee’s retirement will occur. In addition to a minimum retirement age, companies also often provide additional pension benefits to employees who retire younger. This is done often when companies want to shift their workforce to a younger population.   However, in the NFL, and other professional sports, the teams don’t provide the pension benefit to the players. Rather, it is the league itself that handles that. Therefore, the team can really offer no ... [link]