Finance is always considered to be an alien subject matter to the majority.
Or is it really?!
To look beyond the numbers and trying to explore what is known as ‘FINANCIAL FREEDOM’ is the need of the hour. This can be done by becoming ‘FINANCIALLY LITERATE’ and understanding the patterns and the finer nuances of our personal finances.
If you have the question, ‘Why are we boggling our minds over finance being in the sports domain?
Isn’t it something that the geeks should worry about’?
You are not alone!
The importance and relevance of finance, especially in Sports is something that is often overlooked. Right from managing the personal finances for athletes, understanding the implications of their sponsorship deals, tournament expenses, taxes they incur for specialized services that they provide or that are being provided to them and the various categories that concern sports finance as a whole are quite important for them to understand.
Having this purview, Simply Sport Foundation partnered with the Anantapur Sports Academy (ASA) for its FEMALE ATHLETE LEADERSHIP PROGRAM (FALP), to learn how aware the female athletes are, about the skills which help them go beyond sports and help them in their personal development. We conducted a focused group discussion with the female athletes at the academy to understand their various needs for upskilling and growth which includes financial literacy. Our experts developed a module focusing on the rudimentary areas of finance like personal finance, managing money, saving
and investing, banking basics, digital financial tools, so on and so forth.
Understanding the overlap of sports and finance:
Sportsmanship – The quality of sportsmanship, rather the SPORTSWOMANSHIP if you will :)
(No pun intended) are the qualities like FAIRNESS, COURAGE, PERSISTENCE. These are someof the qualities that are required in financial independence as well, in order to achieve
financial freedom. It was inspiring to see how the athletes are trying to imbibe these
qualities at such a young age.
Zeal to ‘beat the odds’ – We realized that the athletes at the academy were from all walks
of life and the spark that they come with, provides us all the motivation to excel at what we
do. The Zeal to ‘get it right’ is the attitude that one needs to have in their investing journey
as well.
Grassroot in all honesty - The emotion that we were able to sense at the academy with all
the stories that the female athletes had to offer of trying to build their sporting careers from
the scratch made us understand how their trajectory has yielded them the desired results
can be compared with how they will be able to carry forward the same narrative when they
begin to manage their finances and expect the desired returns.
The GROWTH mindset - It’s quite apparent how the young girls are trying to put their best
foot forward to make the most of the opportunities that they are offered with, be it in terms
of learning the necessary skills that are pivotal to the real world or their respective sport,
they come with a GROWTH mindset to implement continual learning. This is one of the key
concepts of building WEALTH.
The Story Ahead – While the female athletes at the academy come with a growth mindset, it is evident that they bring with them the 4C’s of Sport – Confidence, Control, Commitment and concentration. It is only ‘Onwards and Upwards’ from here, we are excited to see how the impartation and emphasis on financial literacy is going to help them excel at their sports and beyond.
Author Meghana is an avid fan of tennis, a badminton enthusiast, and a Bcom graduate. With a keen interest in numbers, she has cleared the foundation level of Indian Chartered Accountancy and is currently pursuing Chartered Global Management Accountancy (CGMA-UK). She is an amateur artist and a bibliophile.