Elite athletes' perception of retirement support systems

Abstract

Among factors that affect the success within the sports system is the support service for the development of athlete's career and retirement. The purpose of this study is to investigate the perception of athletes on available post-sports career assistance. The study included 379 athletes associated to the official organizations and/or benefit by the government program to high-performance athletes. It was used a structured questionnaire, from which the response rate was checked. Results showed that 43.2% report that the concentration on being high-performance is negatively affected by the concerns about the future, 74.7% claim the post-sport career assistance is insufficient developed, and 78.3% emphasize that career prospects after retirement are a serious problem. The results suggest that is necessary to improve the support for post-sport career athletes and perhaps take advantage of the knowledge of the former athletes as a potential workforce in areas related to sporting.