Becoming a professional footballer, particularly for a club like Manchester United, is a one-way ticket to a shedload of money at a young age. Wes Brown has experienced the highs and lows of that, enjoying a lavish lifestyle during a 22-year career before running into serious financial issues in retirement.
Brown spent four years in the academy system of his boyhood club and a further 15 years in and around the senior squad, making 362 first-team appearances and pocketing £50,000 a week - the equivalent of £2.6million a year - at his peak. Even after leaving Old Trafford in 2011, by which time he had amassed 23 England caps, the defender continued playing for seven more years with Sunderland, Blackburn Rovers and Indian side Kerala Blasters.
But Brown hit trouble in the spring of 2023 when, a year after a costly split from his ex-wife Leanne, he was left penniless and declared bankrupt by HMRC.
The Daily Mail claim that Brown burned through a huge chunk of his footballer fortune by trying to keep up with team-mates who were on considerably more money than he was. The 45-year-old, who won seven Premier League titles and a host of other trophies under Sir Alex Ferguson, shared a dressing room with big earners like Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs over the course of his Red Devils career.
Just over a year after his bankruptcy, Brown revealed that he was getting back on his feet.
"Luckily I still work, so that’s good," he said. "It’s all been sorted now in the sense that I know what I need to do and everybody is happy with everything. So I’m just getting on with it now and carrying on really. It was a tough ride, it’s something that is hard to deal with on your own at times."
Brown opted against moving into management after hanging up his boots in 2018, but he has spent time coaching, doing ambassadorial work for United, and most pertinently, offering financial literacy training for professional athletes.
The former Three Lions star explained that he could have done with the kind of coaching he now provides when his fortune was still intact.
"For me it was more of a case of not knowing who I could speak to about stuff," he said. "Sometimes it’s just a feeling of, ‘I’m not sure that was the right thing to do’. I always feel [that] if I could have the time again, I would have more people in the room, and I would have taken advice from people. But that wasn’t available at the time."