‘We’re trying to change the narrative surrounding athletes being dumb money’: The Player’s Company on athlete wealth building

Professional athletes are building their own wealth infrastructure rather than relying on traditional financial advisors who treat them as “dumb money.” Sheldon Day and Tom Zhang explain how The Player’s Company is democratizing access to alternative investments and financial education for over 500 athletes across all major sports.

Key takeaways:

• The long-term vision includes operating an athlete-owned bank to provide financial literacy and credit education that many players never received before signing their first contracts
• Financial distress hits athletes during their playing careers, not just after retirement, as family and friends seek handouts while players lack time for proper due diligence on investment opportunities
• Traditional financial advisors keep athletes siloed in stock market investments to maintain assets under management, while The Player’s Company focuses on alternative investments like VC, real estate, and franchising where athletes can add unique value
• The platform launching later this year will provide a unified dashboard showing how different asset classes perform comparatively, with bite-sized educational content to help athletes make informed decisions

As a NFL defensive tackle with the Washington Commanders and eight-year veteran, Sheldon Day understands firsthand the financial realities that athletes face both during and after their careers.

The Player’s Company isn’t just another investment club — it’s a platform working to democratize access to wealth-building tools once reserved for the ultra-wealthy, while providing financial education many athletes never received. Since 2019, TPC has facilitated investments in startups like ZenWTR, Teamworks, and Public.com, proving athletes can be sophisticated capital allocators when given the right resources.

We’ll explore how Sheldon went from reading defensive formations to reading investment prospectuses, and how The Player’s Company is scaling to empower athletes across all sports to build generational wealth.

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The origin story: financial distress in the locker room

“It actually started because I had a teammate that was experiencing financial distress while playing, and I thought it was kind of impossible. You hear the stories about people experiencing financial distress three years removed from their sport, and I was just like, no possible way that this can be happening while you’re going or why you have the potential to make the maximum amount of money that you possibly can. I had a teammate two lockers down from me, and just hearing about his struggles—keeping up with the Joneses, going out with us and clubbing and partying, baby mama issues, just trying to do everything that he could to go broke, in my opinion.”

“I really tried to have a conversation with him, had a conversation with the stakeholders who were supposed to have our best interests in mind, tried to develop some technology, tried to do everything, and it kind of came to a point where I knew that us as players, we had to take a stand. And that’s where the Player’s Company started—how do we stand up for everything that a player needs and aspires to be when it comes to the business outside of the game? We started in the football locker room, and have grown to include NBA, WNBA, professional golfing, every type of sport you can think of. It’s been a pretty dope experience for us so far.”

The philosophy: everyone’s a player

“We also believe everybody’s a player in life. It’s this game that we all try to figure out as we go, and we really try to make sure that everybody has the blueprint and the makeup to be successful in life. Because I’m from Indianapolis, Indiana, and just because I play in the NFL doesn’t mean I can’t affect my community and help my community draw up the same playbook.”

Tom’s journey: from the inside looking in

“As we mentioned, I met Sheldon at the 49ers locker room. I’m originally from Oakland, California, so similar to a lot of players, we came from not the most wealth-building community. Having seen it from the inside, as well as walking through some of the horror stories with a lot of the players I worked with, I found that it was an extremely needed mission. And as Sheldon mentioned, at the time especially, there wasn’t anything that was for the specific purpose for the perpetuation of building wealth for players that was started by players. I hopped on with Sheldon, and I have to say it’s one of the best career decisions I’ve ever made.”

The pressure of playing: financial stress during active careers

“We get hit up from our family members, our friends, our financial advisors about business opportunities, and we don’t usually have the time to do the due diligence that we need to do and make sure that these are the right business moves for us and for our families. I think we get hit up more while we play than when we do post-sport, because once you’re post-sport, everybody kind of forgets about you. It’s not ‘Oh, I need to hit Sheldon up for this,’ it’s more ‘Oh, he probably doesn’t have it anyway.’ We really try to get people to understand that you need a moat and somebody to protect you from those outside noises to make sure that you can make the best financial decision for you and your family.”

The infrastructure gap

“There’s a lack of infrastructure. And that’s why we were created. It was more so the financial advisor kind of was the gatekeeper of everything. You kind of put all of your trust into your financial advisor. You didn’t ask them where my money was going, why my money was doing these things. And now we are challenging the norm and the status quo of financial advisors and making sure that players have the intelligence to ask those questions, but they also have the intelligence to make sure that when they walk into a room, they can talk about equity stakes, they can talk about growth potential and things like that. We’re really trying to change the narrative surrounding athletes and us being ‘dumb money.’ I’m walking in these rooms, ‘Oh, you’re an athlete, you’re dumb money.’ Well, help me not become dumb money. And I think that’s where we’re trying to change the narrative when it comes to athletes.”

Beyond traditional financial advisors

“No offense to financial advisors—I have a financial advisor, I use my financial advisor. It’s more the alternative investment space where we can create true impact on our communities and actually have passive incomes and things like that. My experience with institutional financial advisors is they’re kind of stuck in the stock market. They don’t really expand beyond that, and usually if you do ask them about it, they’re shying you away to keep assets under management. We take more of a holistic view, and we make sure that everybody gets exposed to things. Everybody has different interests—we have guys that love franchising, guys that love real estate, guys that love VC and love to see a company start from zero revenue and help them build up and scale. Everybody has a different lane and a different value add. We felt like, why not create a collective where we can teach guys to find their passions outside of the stock market and the business world so they can add value to these companies.”

Empowerment through financial identity

“That was kind of the original business model—the empowerment and the education around specific niche areas, like what a cap table is, what the difference between a stock and an option is, what are the tax implications. All of these things that as a player, unfortunately, you may not get the exposure to because either one, you don’t get the direct exposure, or you don’t have somebody walking you through it, or you rely on somebody else to do it. Speaking from personal experience, as well as a lot of the interactions I’ve made, the biggest benefit that we add is helping improve the financial identity of our members so that they can essentially fend for themselves. We’re not an advisory practice. We’re just here as an ancillary resource.”

The educational approach

“We do everything from curated events with specific topics on all those things I mentioned, as well as highlighting real world experiences of what players have gone through, both male and female, what the wealth gap discrepancy looks like. We also offer blogs, webinars, and all of the general gamut. The tease—we are planning on launching a platform of sorts later this year to make it a little bit more streamlined and accessible, so that you’re getting bite-sized integrations, as opposed to having to sit through a 30-minute webinar on a specific topic, because we’re all busy folks.”

The three core demographics

“I would say we have three chief primary demographics. Of course, the athlete side, the current and former. We have the high net worth, the accredited investors and the family offices side, where it’s more private wealth focused on direct investments. And then we have the founders, entrepreneurs and C-suites. They all merit different resources and different preferences. But that’s what we love about our community—we create a good enough place where they can all co-mingle.”

“We kind of meet people where they are. We feel like everybody has a different learning curve, everybody has different interests, but we also like to grow together throughout the community as well.”

The network effect and organic growth

“The snowball effect has definitely grown—it’s expedited or sped up our growth. We’ve done a multitude of events in LA, New York, Miami, and one person hears about it, ‘Oh, I’m going to the TPC event,’ and then they’re bringing four or five people. We did run into issues where we had a door number, and they were like, ‘But I brought so-and-so and they just want to learn.’ We’re really trying to make sure that we grow organically and make sure that we can add value to everybody. But we also know that you win when your customers or your clients talk about how well of a job you’re doing.”

Competitive investing culture

“Of course, athletes are competitive in investing. It’s more ‘Did you see what my investment did?’ We’re not even talking about a play that we made. It’s more ‘Did you see my investment do this? I just got in this real estate deal. What are you doing?’ Now it’s comparing your access to things and not necessarily comparing our athletic ability.”

The crypto conversation

“Crypto was the talk of the league last year. ‘Bitcoin’s gonna hit 150, it’s gonna hit 150,’ and then I think it dipped for a little bit. It’s all ebbs and flows, like a roller coaster. You see it go up, ‘It’s gonna hit 150,’ and it goes down, everybody’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m gonna lose all my money. I’ve got to get out.’ Teaching people about the trends of the markets and stuff like that has been really cool. And of course, we don’t know much about crypto—about where it can go and how high it can go, it’s all speculative. Trying to make sure that people understand that as well and teaching them about the crypto world has been dope.”

The technology platform: a unified dashboard

“It really came out of a good conversation Sheldon and I had a while ago. As a player, or even as an investor, when you’re looking at a specific dashboard, you kind of want to see where everything performs together cumulatively, and how that relates to what’s in market. So essentially, that’s what we’re building and hopefully launching with an adjunct to our specific materials on the education side. A good example is, if you are really into real estate, you want to see how fractional single-family is comparing to commercial. If you’re going to invest in it, well great, here’s what the market says, and here’s a couple of snippets of detailed education that you could take a look through to help you make a more informed choice.”

Data sharing and peer learning

“It’s similar to your locker room. If one guy’s doing really well on the field, everybody’s going to want to know what’s the secret. As a community, of course, that’s up to our own privacy and disclosure aspects, but that is a tangent that we can essentially run the route in.”

Community impact and the nonprofit arm

“Everybody wants to get back to their communities which they come from. We actually have a nonprofit arm that we’re spinning up to make sure that we can affect the masses. I speak from my own experience from the east side of Indianapolis—I grew up in poverty. How do I give back and make sure that they have the blueprint to be successful? How do I teach them about real estate 101? How do I teach them about how to go get a mortgage? How do I teach them about the lay of the land to make sure that they can have assets? And then we kind of grow and expand. I think that’s a great thing about the platform that we’re about to launch—to make sure that we can affect the masses and make sure that we can spread the knowledge that we’ve built and learned, and then we also can add the access that we’ve been able to get into.”

Generational wealth as a founding principle

“That’s why we started. We know that we have a short amount of time to make a lot of money, and we want to make sure that our kids’ kids have the effect of that. I know a lot of guys are talking about when they retire, ‘I want to do this, this, this and this,’ and we’re trying to get them, ‘Okay, well, how do we have a plan in place to do X, Y and Z, or how do we make sure that your passion has become lucrative and things like that?’ We’re really big on generational wealth, and we make sure that we want them to pass along all the information to their kids, their community, to make sure that they can uplift everybody that they come in contact with.”

Marketing through word of mouth

“Luckily, we’ve been a very good word-of-mouth company that we haven’t actually done any hard marketing efforts. I would say our biggest distribution is through our events that have grown substantially from 400 attendees to now in the thousands or high hundreds, depending on the venue. In terms of marketing effort, popping on great podcasts or partnering with good institutions—that’s really our bread and butter when it comes to getting the word out.”

Vetting and onboarding

“We have kind of subsets of education content that everybody’s accessible for, and it’s completely free. We are not an investment firm or an advisory service. Once you have the proper labeling, when you go on to sign up for an account, it’ll ask you a whole list of questions: Are you an athlete? What’s the highest level you played sport? Are you an investor? What’s your net worth? What’s your background? Or are you just an entrepreneur looking to connect? We have a good vetting mechanism that puts you in one of the three buckets, or a co-mingling of multiple depending on how you answer. Based off of that you are pointed towards specific material or events, but you’re also free to choose amongst yourselves.”

The online-offline balance

“I think the offline component with the events—a big key of what we do is, whatever market we go into, we want to make sure there’s a community involvement, a charitable component to it, to make sure that we’re essentially having an impact on the local community, whether that’s working with the kids, having a community event, a backpack drive, or giving free tickets to whatever. We’re absolutely going to keep that, and we still plan on doing six to eight events a year. The online or the virtual component is just going to improve as we start launching a little bit more technologies to make it more accessible, easier to digest, and making sure that our members and our core organization gets the most out of it.”

The grand vision: an athlete-owned bank

“This is obviously my baby, and I’m trying to nurture it to make sure we do it the right way. We have a grand goal of hopefully owning and operating an athlete-owned bank. When I very first got in I didn’t understand credit, I didn’t understand anything when it came to financial literacy. So I would love to establish a bank and make sure that athletes are nurtured as they go through their financial journey. And then obviously we want to continue to do events, host more events, and have a bigger footprint at the big sporting events. Super Bowl next year is going to be a really big year for TPC, NBA All-Star is hopefully going to be another big year for us next year, and continue down the gamut to make sure that we have a footprint at all major sporting events, and make sure that we continue to change the communities which we come from, and continue to affect both present and past players, to make sure that we continue to add value to their lives.”

Domestic and international expansion

“We would love to grow domestically and internationally, and be the HubSpot for player education as well as specific offerings and having our footprint impact market to market to market to market, so that we stay true to our mission.”