Money makes the world go ‘round, so that adage goes. But for many top pro athletes and entertainers, money sets them on a dizzying spin cycle that all too often ends with an abrupt fall.
However, here comes former 11-year NFL player Adewale (Wale) Ogunleye, 44, head of UBS’s Athletes and Entertainers Strategic Client Segment.
“We feel it’s our duty to teach our clients exactly what financial management is,” he explains in an interview with ThinkAdvisor. “If it has a dollar sign, we want our advisors attached to it.”
Those clients are some of America’s biggest and brightest in the sports and entertainment worlds.
The UBS segment comprises 28 advisors who have earned the Athlete Entertainer Consultant designation after being trained specifically to help successful athletes and entertainers.
The firm approaches managing these stars’ financial lives in the same way it handles those of entrepreneurs.
Though, to be sure, these folks need a special touch. “They don’t know who to trust,” Ogunleye notes, and “are scared when they see headlines of entertainers and athletes going broke.”
Indeed, a white paper prepared by UBS Financial Services and released in June states that 8 out of 10 NFL players and 6 out of 10 NBA players “are in financial stress or bankrupt within 5 years of retirement from professional sports.”
In the interview, Ogunleye — a Brooklyn, New York-born son of Nigerian immigrants — discusses how having loose parameters…
