The folklore check
The famous stat says 78% of NFL players go broke in two years. The bankruptcy records say 1.9%.
A number published without a study in 2009 has outlived every correction, and money-advice content still repeats it. The measured rates: about 2% of players file for bankruptcy within two years of retirement, 16% by year twelve. The real finding is stranger: more money doesn't lower the risk.
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The earliest published version is a March 2009 Sports Illustrated piece by Pablo S. Torre: "By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce." The sourcing, in full: "reports from a host of sources (athletes, players' associations, agents and financial advisers)." No study, no survey, no named source.
The measurement exists because four economists went to the court records. Their 2015 study collected bankruptcy filings for every player drafted from 1996 to 2003 and named the magazine number directly: their result "is quite different from a widely-cited Sports Illustrated article," they wrote. "After 2 years of retirement, only about 1.9 percent of players in our sample have filed for bankruptcy."
None of this means athletes are fine. The same study found filings begin almost immediately at retirement and keep coming: the rate climbs steadily to 15.7% at twelve years, and the players' filing rate runs about triple that of a same-age cohort of ordinary men. And money does not protect them: "bankruptcy rates are not affected by a player's total earnings or career length," with only a small exception the paper finds in the first two years of retirement.
Seventeen years on, the original number still circulates uncorrected. Kiplinger repeated it as "statistics suggest" in 2021, six years after the court-records study; Huff Sports states it today as flat fact. Like the going-pro odds, the famous number was never a measurement, and the people repeating it never went looking for one.