http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/20715128/nba-player-salaries-take-home-pay
This article has some pretty good insight on professional athlete take home pay. There's a lot more to it than just agents fees and taxes. Athletes are taxed for each location they play in, and other money is held for various reasons (pensions, union/collective bargaining stuff, etc.)
Thanks for that article -- it's nice to see actual numbers broken out. I'd really be interested in seeing how it breaks down for the "lower"-paid players, like Joe Smith -- looks like he made between $1M - $6M/yr. See
https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/s/smithjo02.html. I think it's like what you said, a lot of guys with no experience with money see figures like "I have a $16M contract" and immediately think they are set for life. Except that $16M is over 5-6 years, and some of it is going to be incentive money that you may not get, and then you pay all the taxes and fees, so if it's a $2M year, maybe the guy brings home $900K. Which, again, doesn't suck AT ALL. But the problem is he thinks he's rich, so he buys the house and the car that $900K/yr can buy you, and he doesn't know enough to do the math and realize that if he wants to live on $900K/yr forever, he needs $22,500,000 in the bank, which is more than his entire salary over the next 5-6 years!
I think most of us here who had a, say, $16M windfall would figure out, ok, I'm going to lose half to taxes and fees and such, so now I've got maybe $7-8M left, and $7M will provide me a
@$280K lifestyle, so I'm going to buy the house and the car that I can afford forever on $250K/yr.* But to expect kids to do this at 18 or 21, just at the time when they think they are immortal and the gravy train will continue forever, and with no background or education in finance -- and certainly no experience with that kind of money -- well, it's just never going to happen. You hope most of them wise up and realize how short their career may be and how much they need to save to sustain their lifestyle while there is still time to change course, but, yeah, not holding my breath.
With respect to the hangers-on, I think that is largely cultural. When you are poor, you have no financial capital, and so you rely on social capital. When someone needs help, you help them, and when you need help, they help you. And that also means that windfalls are shared. There is a real poverty mindset that says that good times never last, and if you try to save something for tomorrow, it might not be there, so better enjoy it while it lasts. So put all that together, and when someone hits it big, the very natural response is to share the wealth with everyone within their social network who has helped them in the past, and to live large while the getting is good. And it unfortunately takes years and a lot of hard work (internally) to change that scarcity mindset. So it's not just "hangers-on" who are sponging off their friend; you'd have to change the entire value system that these guys have lived by their whole lives. And really, who is even going to tell them they need to make that change, since everyone around them benefits from their continued largesse?
*Well, most people
here would probably live on a small fraction of that and figure out something else to do with the remainder. ;-)