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
I suspect that what happened was the business agent negotiating the ‘set for life’ 2nd contract that every NFL rookie wants, told his client “we’ll handle the sale of your old house, kid” after negotiating the deal.
The agent then forgot about it. The agent or an affiliated company may have been the actual owners, also. If the agent didn’t have another client on that team, the property may not have been thought about at all.