EP34 - Sports Insurance and the Discipline of Long-Term Thinking
Sport is a mirror. It reflects performance, discipline, ambition, and vulnerability. Insurance, at its best, exists for the same reasons. Yet the intersection between sport and insurance remains misunderstood, often treated as a niche rather than a serious strategic domain.
In this Episode:
Sports insurance requires long-term thinking, strong partnerships, and human awareness. Francois Jacquemin reflects on covering athletes, managing complex risk, and why protection must extend beyond clubs to people.
My exposure to sports insurance did not come from theory. It came from practice, early in my time as a CEO. I was asked to help structure insurance coverage for a national football team. The objective was clear. When players were injured while representing their country, clubs carried the financial burden without receiving performance in return. Insurance was meant to restore balance.
We were not large enough to carry that risk alone. So we built a structure involving specialist partners, including Lloyd’s. Each party understood its role. Players were protected. Clubs were reassured. Shareholders were not exposed to unmanaged risk. It worked because the value chain was clear and the relationships were built with intent.
What I learned quickly is that sports insurance is not about appetite alone. It is about comfort with complexity. Athletes travel. Conditions change. Exposure is dynamic. Claims do not follow neat patterns. This requires leadership that accepts uncertainty and pricing that reflects cycles rather than single years.
Later in my career, a very different perspective emerged. At a conference on retirement and longevity, discussions focused on the cost of living with cognitive disease. The financial impact can be substantial and long-lasting. Suddenly, the parallel with sport became obvious.
Many professional athletes retire in their twenties or thirties. Some develop cognitive conditions linked to repeated trauma. The need for long-term care often appears decades before traditional retirement planning would ever begin. Yet awareness at the start of a sporting career is close to zero.
Young athletes, even highly paid ones, do not think about insurance. Confidence is high. Time feels infinite. That is human. It is also where responsibility must shift toward education, advisory ecosystems, and thoughtful product design.
Here, sports insurance becomes less about institutions and more about society. It is no longer only clubs insuring assets. It is individuals protecting dignity, independence, and future choice.
This requires cooperation between insurers, brokers, medical experts, and athlete representatives. It involves timing, empathy, and restraint. Not every solution should be sold aggressively. Some should simply be explained early enough to matter.
These are small segments of the insurance market. They are also intellectually demanding and deeply human. For insurers willing to think long term and act with clarity, they offer more than growth. They offer relevance.
Timecode:
00:00 Introduction to Sports and Insurance
00:54 Personal Anecdote: National Football Team Insurance
02:57 Challenges and Considerations in Sports Insurance
04:16 The Importance of Long-Term View in Sports Insurance
05:55 Retirement and Cognitive Disease in Athletes
08:16 Creating Awareness and Solutions for Athletes
09:31 Conclusion: Two Approaches in Sports Insurance
François Links:
Apple Podcast
Transcript:
When we made this podcast in London in the summer, we had several side discussions on sport and insurance because there was a lot of talk about health and what happens when there is a sports accident, especially in specific sports. Anyway, we had some discussions which were more on a personal level.
I was encouraged then to come back to the topic of sport and insurance and my experience in that field. I'm not a specialist, actually, but throughout my career, I had the chance or the challenge to develop insurance products for covering sports events—sport at an amateur level or sport at a professional level.
An anecdote from my first time as CEO: I was approached to cover a national football team. What that means is that we took the angle of disability—disability for a national football player if one is injured on international duty. They come back to the club, but they can't play for one week or a few weeks. Therefore, the club is not very happy because they have to pay the player, but he is not playing. It's a bit annoying, let's say, and therefore the national team was taking an insurance coverage for the players when they were on international duty.
We managed to find a specific insurance. Of course, we were a small insurer; we couldn't take that ourselves, so we had to outsource the full risk-carrying, or the risk itself, to Lloyd's, which is a very specific, much more specialist type of reinsurer than most. Therefore, we established a very good structure that allowed the national players to be covered, my shareholders to be happy because there was a very limited risk, and the Lloyd's syndicate to be very happy because they were covering the team. It worked. It was very good in terms of service; we had established the right level of value chain.
At the time, I was moving to a different role in that group, and the next CEO was very uncomfortable with the situation. Sports insurance is not for everyone. You have to be a bit passionate, be open, and be willing to develop relationships and a distribution structure for that very small segment of insurance distribution. But if you manage that, you can be very successful. If you are not very familiar with that, or if you are a bit uncomfortable with sport or that type of distribution and risk-carrying, then you won't like it.
We were covering that team and we never had any claims. For two years, no claims. And my following CEO decided to cancel the contract. The year we canceled the contract, that team became world champion, actually. So it would have been a good marketing element for the firm. But that's just the funny part. The key here is that developing sports insurance products is very specific. It requires that either you have a full value chain and long-term experience, or that you rely on a large number of external partners and are able to develop the right product.
It's also not a segment where we should have a short-term view. It should be a long-term view because cycles exist and bad luck exists as well. So, it needs to be seen not on a one-year basis, but over several years on long-term cycles. Of course, pricing needs to be adapted. Coverage needs to be adapted. It's also very challenging because the population that you cover do various types of sport. They are scattered around one country or several countries. They don't necessarily do the sport in their own home club; they also travel. Circumstances change much more than in traditional insurance.
There are a lot of variables that need to be taken into consideration that make this insurance very exciting from my point of view, because intellectually it's complex. Therefore, lots of solutions need to be put in place to hedge the risk and to help all those people doing sport at an amateur or professional level to recover or to be aware of what's going on. Usually, that is when a club or a sports association comes to the insurance company and says, "I want to cover my members. I want to cover my sportsmen and sportswomen."
But let's take a totally different angle. A long time ago, I was in Newport Beach and Los Angeles for a conference on retirement. You might say retirement and sports have nothing to do with each other. Let me go there, but I need a bit of storytelling first.
At the pension conference, there was a strong element about how much money someone needs in retirement. When everything goes well, the retiree will have a very healthy life and very limited support will be needed; the person can be living standalone or in a family, with low costs and simply enjoying life. But there are also a lot of retirees who have conditions and they need to be helped by external parties.
That was at a moment where there was a lot of discussion about cognitive disease and the cost of living independently supported by people in day-to-day life. When you have a cognitive disease, it can amount to a very high level of cost every month. Now in sports, there are also a lot of examples of retirees who retire in their late twenties or in their thirties, but can very quickly develop cognitive disease problems. That requires a lot of money so that those people can be helped in their day-to-day life.
It's not something that the clubs are thinking about. It's something that the sportsmen and women need to be thinking about and be made aware of that situation. Also, the best sportsmen and women have money for it and they will be able to buy this insurance contract. But basically, when you're an 18 or 19-year-old being paid a fortune in one of the best clubs in the world—in football, for instance, or the NFL or in rugby—you don't give a damn about insurance. You don't care about it.
More and more now, this awareness is being created. This awareness is being created by those people who suffer from that disease, or by insurance companies who try to approach them and work together with the brokers and agents who take care of those sportsmen and women so that at least they put a bit of money aside or take an insurance contract.
If you compare this with the first level of insurance I was talking about before, where clubs are willing to insure their members, here it is more of a societal problem for that segment of the population. It is also a work of association—those people who suffer from this problem wanting to create a better future for sportsmen and women together with insurance. The whole ecosystem of insurance distribution and the medical ecosystem can work together to create the right environment and the right product, and sell them at the right moment to those sportsmen.
So, two different approaches in sports insurance. Two different ways of doing business. Two different ways of developing the product. Still, they are two very small segments in insurance, which I find very exciting and which are growing. It is maybe a growth engine for insurance companies, too.