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 incentive for a player to leave while on good terms with the team.

Teams can release or trade players, move them down on the depth chart, or occasionally restructure their contract. But as we are seeing with the Green Bay Packers, these moves can come off disrespectfully to a player that has shown the team great loyalty. 

I believe the Packers are truly in a tough spot, but are handling the situation as well as they can. They certainly owe a lot to Brett Favre for all the success he has brought to them and their fans, but they also feel the need to move on. They feel Aaron Rodgers can be a great quarterback and that he needs to start playing a significant role on their team. 

If they were a business, the Packers could just offer Favre extra money upon retirement to leave now. Even though their intentions would be clear, it would certainly show no disrespect to the superstar.

But the NFL is the business that controls Favre’s retirement account, and Roger Goodell is certainly not going to pick up the tab for Green Bay on this one.

The retirement issue for professional sports is further different from business because players retire so much younger. It is much more difficult for them to visualize their pension since it is still many years away.

So far, my discussion has been from the perspective of the team. Now I want to shift to the perspective of the player.

Like any little kid, teenager, or even most adults, Brett Favre just wants to play football. And he is good at it and people love watching him play. So who’s to blame Favre for wanting to stick around?

As long as they love the game, I have no problem with athletes wanting to play until they can play no more. Being a Penn State fan, I have no problem with Joe Paterno still wanting to coach. 

The issue of players (or coaches) sticking around too long can't be expected to be resolved by the player in question leaving on their own terms, but must be handled adequately by the organizations involved.

It seems like there was an abundance of professional athletes that had had trouble retiring or staying retired from their sports. Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Vinny Testaverde, Julio Franco, Emmitt Smith, and many more, depending on your opinion.

The problem for the athlete again is that their retirement comes 25-30 years before a normal retirement age for most other careers. They have spent their whole lives focusing on their sport, and then have difficulty grasping so many years without it. 

It is certainly true that many athletes successfully transition into coaching or broadcasting after retiring, so they stay connected with the environment they are used to. However, I would guess that many athletes struggle with the steps they need to take in the next part of their lives. Change is always a scary thought for many people.

There is one retirement that sticks out to me in sports more than any other—that of Barry Sanders. 

Barry Sanders was the most electrifying player to watch in his time, hands down. His retirement from the NFL was both abrupt and unexpected. I, along with many others, expected and hoped for Barry to return to the league after a year or two. However, he did not.

Sanders’ retirement represents an idea that has skyrocketed in popularity throughout the media—the art of going out on top.

John Elway, Tiki Barber, Michael Strahan, and almost Pedro Martinez (he had several conversations mentioning early retirement) have all followed this path.

This category of retirement usually works out great for the players. The only exception I would argue is Tiki Barber, only because his team won the Super Bowl the year after his departure. However, the complaints in this category usually come from the teams or the fans. 

Nobody else involved in football was glad to see Barry Sanders go. Not the Lions. Not the NFL. And absolutely not the fans. 

Retiring from a sport is a tricky business. In a profession that is so extensively followed by the general population, it’s very difficult to please everybody. 

Most players retire with little to no fanfare, but timing when to retire for a superstar is always heavily scrutinized. 

However, it seems that the superstars always win. Going out on top, and perhaps leaving earlier than expected, always preserves the players’ image. And, staying around too long still gives the player the chance to do something they love on a national stage. 

The choice of when to retire can only be made by the potential retiree, and in the world of professional sports, it is difficult for many of us to accept that.