A newsletter about money, athletes, and the financial life nobody prepares you for.
Before we get into this week's topic.
This week I found myself commenting on two different posts making a version of the same argument: your image is rented attention, your name is owned infrastructure, and only one of them survives past your playing career if you build it properly.
Both were written from a US, college-sports point of view. I never played a single game under NCAA rules. My career was built across multiple European countries, several clubs, several different sets of national law. So I went looking for what "protect your name" actually means once you're not operating inside one country's system.
I'll be honest — the answer surprised me, and I don't think it's obvious unless you walk through it with a real situation in front of you. So that's what this issue does — and it's not really about basketball, or being famous, or being European. A world-ranked sprinter can earn a fraction of what an average professional in a bigger commercial sport earns, while being far more accomplished in their own field. Level of achievement and level of earnings are two different things, and this issue is for anyone where either one applies — whatever the sport, whatever the country, whatever stage of a career.
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A career that looks like most careers
Picture an athlete — call him Marko, a composite, not a real person — who spends eight years as a professional. Not a household name, not necessarily even a top earner in his own sport. Solid, respected, working. He competes for two years under contract in Lithuania, three in Germany, three in Spain. A normal shape for a normal career, in almost any sport you could name.
At each club, somewhere in his contract, there's a clause about his image — can the club use his photo in marketing, can a sponsor put his face on a poster, does he get paid extra for it, who owns a video of him scoring a specific basket. He never reads that clause closely. Nobody around him does either. It gets treated the way most of this newsletter's readers treat it: boilerplate, someone else's problem, sorted once and forgotten.
Here's what actually happens to Marko, and it's not what most people assume — and it applies the same way whether Marko plays basketball, football, or competes individually in a sport where "signing with a club" looks completely different.
What travels with him, and what doesn't
The image rights terms he agreed to in Lithuania do not carry over to Germany. They don't carry over to Spain either. Each country has its own approach to what "image rights" even means legally, and on top of that, each contract says something slightly different regardless of the country. Marko has now had three separate negotiations over the same basic question — who controls his own image — and three different answers, none of which he actually noticed changing.
Meanwhile, there's a version of protection Marko never set up, that would have followed him automatically to every one of those three countries from a single afternoon of paperwork in year one: a trademark on his name, filed once through the EU system, covering all 27 member states at once. Messi's name is protected this way. So is Cristiano Ronaldo's "CR7." Cole Palmer's goal celebration nickname, "Cold Palmer," is an EU trademark too — not because any of them are uniquely famous under EU law, but because any of them could have filed the same paperwork Marko could have filed, at any point in a career, for a modest one-time cost.
That last part matters more than it sounds like it should. This isn't a story about what Messi or Ronaldo can afford to do that other athletes can't. The EU trademark system doesn't check how famous you are, what sport you play, or how much you earn before it lets you file — it's the same process, the same modest cost, whether you're a global name in a major commercial sport or a nationally-ranked competitor in a sport nobody's paying huge sponsorship money into yet. A high level of achievement doesn't require a high income for this to be worth doing. Marko could have done exactly what Messi and Ronaldo did, at exactly the same price, at 22, three countries before any of this started mattering — and so could an athlete in a sport where the money looks nothing like football or basketball.
Flip the assumption most people walk in with. The thing you'd guess needs redoing at every new club — your name — is actually the part that's efficient to protect once, early, and forget about. The thing you'd assume is automatically yours — control over your own image — is the part that quietly resets every time you sign somewhere new.
Why "I'm not famous enough for this" is the wrong instinct
Here's the part that would have made a difference for me to hear at 22, not 35.
A local business doesn't need you to be Messi to use your name. A gym opens a "training program" using an athlete's name because they're known regionally, not internationally. A local shop sells shirts with a nickname printed on the back. A fan page sells merchandise nobody authorized. None of this requires you to be a global star, or to play a sport with major broadcast deals behind it. It just requires you to be recognized in the one town, region, or competitive community where that business operates — which almost every athlete, in almost every sport, at almost every level, already is.
Without a registered trademark, stopping any of that, or getting paid for it, is a much harder, slower, more expensive fight than it needs to be. With one, it's a straightforward claim.
One more practical detail, because this is where people get stuck: trademarking your literal full name can sometimes be difficult if it's common, or if it doesn't feel distinctive enough on its own. That's exactly why Ronaldo trademarked "CR7," not "Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro," and why Palmer's celebration nickname is the registered mark, not his birth name. You don't need to be famous to do the same thing on a smaller scale — a nickname, initials with a number, a personal logo or crest. The version of your identity that's genuinely distinctive is usually easier to protect than your plain legal name, and it's the same filing cost either way.
One action this week
If you're currently playing, or advising someone who is: pull out your current contract and find the image rights clause. Don't assume it says what your last one said. Read it fresh, this time, on purpose.
And separately — genuinely separately, because these are two different problems with two different solutions — ask whether there's a version of your name or nickname worth protecting once, early, while it's simple and inexpensive to do. Not because you're famous. Because you might be, later, and the filing is the same price either way, whether you do it now or wait until it's too late to matter.
This isn't legal advice — for the specifics of your own contract or your own name, that conversation belongs with a sports IP lawyer, not a newsletter. But knowing which of these two things resets at every stop, and which one doesn't, is worth knowing before you're standing in front of a new contract, assuming last time's answer still applies.
Final Whistle Finance is written by a former professional basketball player and ACCA-qualified finance professional with Big Four audit experience. This newsletter is for educational purposes and does not constitute regulated financial or legal advice.
If you found this useful, forward it to one athlete you know who needs to read it.
Next issue: the insurance nobody buys until they wish they had — disability and income protection for athletes, and why "I'm not a pro yet" or "I don't earn enough for that" are usually the wrong reasons to skip it.