Disability Insurance for the Professional Athlete


Like the easily recognizable names in Hollywood, professional athletes have become some of the most famous faces in the world and important representatives of the many-multi-billion dollar sports entertainment industry.  Their performances and physical prowess have brought them not only fame, but astronomical incomes.  Pro athlete contracts have reached meteoric heights in recent years, comparable to showbiz elite and the highest-compensated of business executives.  It has become common to find single-digit length term contracts provide hundreds of millions of dollars to the biggest athletes in mainstream sports like baseball, football and basketball.

Although their abilities seem almost superhuman at times, athletes are people like you and me, and their bodies are susceptible to injury and disease just like anyone else on earth.  But unlike you and me, they put their relatively fragile structures under severe strain on a regular basis, making injury and resulting disablement an everyday risk.

While disablement could mean the loss of $100,000 of annual income to a plumber or accountant, the same disablement could spell the end of $10,000,000 of annual income to a star running back or pitcher.  Pro athletes have so much more to lose than most of us can imagine.

Depending on the sport, many player contracts leave much of an athlete’s income unprotected in the unfortunate case of that athlete’s partial, total or permanent disablement.  So then it becomes very apparent that sports stars need disability insurance like every working American and lots of it.

Contract-specific personal disability insurance is imperative in the world of professional sports, and Petersen International offers an array of carefully constructed disability programs for conventional team-sport athletes, extreme-sport athletes, golfers, jockeys, racecar drivers and any other individual making a living in professional athletics.

Petersen International Underwriters offers policies that financially indemnify a player’s contract including endorsements and signing bonuses.  Coverage is available to alleviate the risk of an athlete’s loss of skill or value to an employer after a career-altering disability due to accident or illness.  The product can also be designed to guarantee the future contract value of a player in case of an unforeseen disablement.

Petersen International is the foremost expert in sports disability insurance with an experienced team of underwriters who have the connections, the rates and the flexibility to provide professional athletes with the most progressive income protection insurances in the world.