“$50 million in riskless US treasuries would pay you $3 million a year.”
Passive investments are the way to go if the goal is to preserve capital—that should be the sole goal of NFL players—no point in being greedy.
I would not recommend owning property for rent—though owning a few houses in different locations for family use would be fine.
A friend lived next door to an NFL player. He was on our local team for his first contract, had a very nice, but not huge house in an upscale suburb. Got traded, and received a huge new contract from his new team in a new city.
The guy simply abandoned his original home. He still owned it, but stopped cutting the grass, doing maintanence, and we think - stopped paying taxes. It sat empty for 3 years. It eventually was hit by lightening, which caused a small fire. The town stepped in to force a sale.
Bizarre. Maybe he felt he was too rich to worry about a $750K home, or maybe he had only so much brain capacity to think about things outside football