Sports Insurance: A Different Way of Thinking About Risk

We recorded a podcast in London one summer, and as often, the conversation didn’t stop when the microphone stopped. We ended up speaking about sport and insurance on the side very casually at first, and then with more depth than I expected.

It usually starts with health. With accidents. With the obvious questions. What happens when someone gets injured? Who pays? Who carries the consequences? And in some sports, those questions become very concrete, very quickly.

I was encouraged afterwards to come back to the topic and share a bit of my own experience. I should say it upfront: I’m not a specialist in sports insurance. But throughout my career, I’ve been exposed to it more than once, sometimes by chance, sometimes because the business asked for it, sometimes because the market created the opportunity.

And I’ve learned that sports insurance is a small segment, yes, but it forces you to think in a different way. Not because sport is special. But because the combination of risk, emotion, public visibility, and ecosystem dynamics makes it structurally different from many traditional lines.

A story from my first CEO role.

When I was CEO for the first time, we were approached to cover a national football team.

It sounds glamorous when you say it like that. In reality, the request was very practical.

The angle was disability disability in the sense of “not being able to play.” A national team player goes on international duty, gets injured, comes back to his club, and cannot play for one week or several weeks. The club continues paying his salary, and the player is not on the field. The club is not happy, which is understandable. And the relationship between clubs and national federations becomes tense, again understandably.

So the national team wanted coverage for those international duty periods. Not because they wanted to protect the player emotionally. It was about protecting the ecosystem. Keeping the relationships workable. Keeping the economic logic acceptable for clubs.

Now, we were a small insurer. We could not carry that risk ourselves. And this is often the first reality check in sports insurance: you need to know what you can actually take, and what you should not.

So we built a structure and outsourced the full risk-carrying to Lloyd’s. Lloyd’s is a specific environment. More specialist. More comfortable with unusual risks. More used to tailoring structures that don’t fit standard insurance boxes.

The outcome was clean.

The players were covered. The national federation had what it needed. Our shareholders were satisfied because the risk on our side was limited and properly controlled. And the Lloyd’s syndicate was happy because the contract fit their appetite.

It worked. And it worked not only because the wording was correct, but because the value chain was right. The partnerships were right. The service logic was right.

That matters more than people think.

Sports insurance is not for everyone.

Around that period, I moved into a different role in the group. A new CEO took over, and he was uncomfortable with the situation.

Not because there were claims. We had none. For two years, no claims.

Not because the contract was poorly structured. It wasn’t.

He was simply uncomfortable with sports insurance as a segment. And that’s something I’ve observed more than once: sports insurance is not for everyone. You have to be at least a little passionate, or at least curious. You need to be comfortable with the fact that this is not a mass-market machine. It’s relationship-driven. It’s a specialist. Distribution is narrow. Expertise sits in pockets. And the conversation around risk is often emotional, sometimes political.

If you don’t like that environment, you’ll want to simplify it. And simplification in this segment often means exiting.

So the contract was cancelled.

The year the contract was cancelled, that team became world champion.

This is the funny part. From a marketing perspective, it would have been valuable for the firm to still be associated with the team. Even if there were no claims, the story alone had value. But that’s not the main point.

The key is that this segment requires continuity. A long view. A willingness to stay in the game even when it is quiet, especially when it is quiet, because cycles exist.

Why a short-term view doesn’t work.

Sports insurance is not a business you evaluate on one year. Or on one renewal.

Bad luck exists. Variance exists. You can have several quiet years and then one year where everything happens. Or the opposite. If you take decisions based on the calm years, you often regret it in the difficult ones. And if you take decisions based on the difficult ones, you often miss the value of the cycle.

So pricing needs to be adapted over time. Coverage needs to be refined. And the business needs to be managed like something alive, not like a product on a shelf.

What makes it challenging is also what makes it interesting.

The population you cover is not stable in the same way as in many traditional segments. People do different sports. At different intensities. In different environments. Often across regions. Often while travelling. Sometimes outside their home club. Circumstances change constantly.

This creates a lot of variables. And those variables require solutions: underwriting logic, prevention elements, service design, and risk hedging mechanisms. It’s intellectually complex. You need to build structures, not just policies.

In many cases, this insurance starts with a club or a sports association coming to you and saying, “I want to cover my members. I want to cover my athletes.”

That’s one entry point. And it makes sense.

But there is another angle that I find even more interesting and arguably more important in the long term.

The risk that starts after the career ends.

A long time ago, I was in Newport Beach and Los Angeles for a conference on retirement. On the surface, retirement and sport have nothing to do with each other. But bear with me.

The conference focused on a question that always comes back: how much money does someone need in retirement?

When everything goes well, retirement is manageable. People remain healthy, independent, and active. Costs are contained. Life is good.

But when health deteriorates, especially with cognitive disease, the equation changes completely. Costs increase. Support is needed daily. Living independently becomes expensive. Month after month, sometimes for years.

At that time, there was a lot of discussion about cognitive disease and the cost of care.

And what struck me is that in sport, we have a population that “retires” very early late twenties, thirties but can face cognitive issues much earlier than we normally associate with that type of disease.

There are athletes who develop serious cognitive challenges after their careers. And when that happens, the financial burden is heavy, not only for them, but often for families around them.

It is not something clubs naturally think about. Clubs think about performance. They think about injury this season. They think about contracts. They rarely think about the long tail of health risk after retirement.

Athletes themselves often don’t want to think about it either.

When you’re 18 or 19 and being paid a fortune in a top club football, NFL, or rugby, insurance is not on your mind. You feel strong. You feel protected. You’re focused on the next match. You don’t care.

That’s human.

Awareness is increasing, but it requires the ecosystem.

What is changing is awareness. Slowly.

Awareness is often driven by those who suffer from these problems, or by associations formed around them. And insurers are increasingly trying to play a role, together with brokers, agents, and the people who advise athletes in their careers.

The distribution reality here is very different from the first model.

In the first model, a club or association comes to insure a group. It’s institutional. It’s collective.

In the second model, you need to reach an individual at the right moment. Not too early, when they ignore it. Not too late, when it becomes unaffordable or irrelevant. And access is rarely direct: it is mediated by agents, advisors, sometimes unions, sometimes family structures.

This becomes more than a product discussion. It becomes a societal discussion for a very specific population: how do we help people who generate extraordinary value early in life, but whose careers are short and whose long-term health risks can be underestimated?

And insurers cannot solve this alone.

It requires collaboration between the insurance ecosystem and the medical ecosystem. It requires associations. It requires advisors. It requires the right language and the right timing. It requires building products that are not only technically sound but also acceptable and understandable to the target population.

Two approaches, two value chains.

So when I look at sports insurance, I see two distinct approaches.

One is the institutional approach: clubs and associations insuring members, protecting the system, managing immediate exposure.

The other is the long-tail individual approach: protecting athletes against risks that appear later, sometimes long after the public stops paying attention.

Two different ways of doing business. Two different ways of developing products. Two different distribution logics.

Both are small segments. But both are growing. And both can be meaningful if managed with the right mindset.

Because in sports insurance, you cannot fake capability. You either have the value chain and the experience internally, or you rely on external partners and build the structure properly. And you need to accept that this is not a one-year game.

What I like about sports insurance is not the “sport” part. It’s what it forces you to do as an insurer.

It forces you to accept complexity. To build partnerships. To think in cycles. To balance technical structure with human reality. To design value chains that actually work when circumstances change.

And it reminds you of something simple: risk is never only statistical. It lives inside ecosystems. It moves with behavior. And sometimes it only becomes visible when it’s already too late.

That is why, for a small segment, it can teach you a lot.

François Jacquemin

P.S.: Want to watch the video version of this article?

Go to https://www.francoisjacquemin.com/covered/sports-insurance-and-the-discipline-of-long-term-thinking