HOW MUCH SHIT ARE ATHLETES SUPPOSED TO PUT UP WITH?
OVERSEASX | WHAT I READ THIS WEEK
Friday, October 9, 2026
Three research papers. Psychological mistreatment in sports, the mental health consequences of moving around the world, and why telling athletes to be responsible with money isn't much of a financial education program.
I've spent a ridiculous amount of my life accepting things that, under just about any other circumstances, I would have considered completely fucking insane.
That's professional sports, I guess. You spend your entire childhood dreaming about playing basketball for a living, and once somebody finally agrees to pay you to do it, there's this unspoken understanding that you should be grateful enough to put up with just about anything.
And for a long time, I was.
When you're playing overseas, the definition of normal gets pretty warped. You don't speak the language, you don't understand half the things happening around you, and your entire livelihood depends on the opinions of a few people who might decide they don't need you anymore because you went 2 for 11 on Saturday.
Eventually you get pretty good at distinguishing between the inconveniences that come with living in another country and the genuinely fucked up things that nobody should have to tolerate. Although, looking back, I'm not entirely sure I was always very good at telling the difference.
I read three pieces of research this week that got me thinking about all of this. One looked at psychological mistreatment among elite developing athletes, another came from the International Olympic Committee about mental health and the challenges athletes face throughout their careers, and the third examined how athletes approach managing their money.
I know. Thrilling Friday afternoon reading.
But I found myself going down a rabbit hole because all three touched on things that I spent years dealing with, often without much of an understanding of what was happening or where I was supposed to turn when something went wrong.
And the more I read, the more I started wondering how much responsibility we can reasonably put on athletes to figure everything out themselves.
WHEN DOES BEING MENTALLY TOUGH BECOME AN EXCUSE FOR PUTTING UP WITH BULLSHIT?
Research: Psychological Violence and Mental Health Outcomes in NextGen Athletes: Moderating Role of Mental Performance Skills
Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2026
I have a complicated relationship with the whole concept of mental toughness.
I believe in it. I spent a good portion of my life trying to develop it, and some of the coaches who pushed me the hardest ended up teaching me things that were incredibly valuable long after I stopped playing basketball.
There is something to be said for being uncomfortable, exhausted, frustrated, and still finding a way to do your job. I think athletes need that ability, especially when their career takes them halfway around the world to a place where almost nothing works the way they're accustomed to.
But somewhere along the way, we started using mental toughness as an excuse for an awful lot of shitty behavior.
The researchers surveyed 318 developing elite athletes, examining psychological mistreatment, mental performance skills, and mental health.
Here are three numbers that caught my attention.
19.8% reported clinical levels of anxiety symptoms.
21.4% reported clinical levels of depressive symptoms.
45.3% were classified as flourishing in mental health.
Those figures come from this particular group of athletes, so we shouldn't assume the same percentages apply to professional basketball players overseas. Still, the findings are worth paying attention to, especially what the researchers discovered about mistreatment coming from other athletes.
We spend a lot of time discussing abusive coaches, terrible owners, and organizations that treat players like they're disposable. I've certainly got plenty to say about all three, but we don't talk nearly enough about the people sharing the locker room with you.
Because those relationships can get pretty fucking complicated.
Professional basketball is a strange workplace. You're supposed to build relationships with your teammates and trust one another, but you're also competing with some of those same guys for playing time, contracts, and potentially the opportunity to stay employed.
The guy sitting next to you might be somebody you'd trust with your life. He might also be quietly hoping you have the worst shooting night of your career because he'd love another ten minutes on the floor.
Sometimes he's both.
I've made some of the closest friends of my life through basketball, and I wouldn't trade those relationships for anything. But I've also been around long enough to know that putting a bunch of highly competitive people in a locker room with their livelihoods on the line doesn't automatically create some beautiful brotherhood.
Throw in a language barrier, cultural differences, and a few guys who aren't particularly happy with their roles, and you can have one hell of an interesting workplace.
The study found that psychological violence from fellow athletes was significantly associated with poorer mental health. Athletes with stronger mental performance skills generally reported better mental health outcomes, and there was some evidence those skills helped reduce the association between mistreatment by authority figures and anxiety.
That sounds encouraging, until you consider how easily a sports organization could completely miss the point.
I can practically see the meeting.
Somebody in management reads the study, decides the players need to become mentally tougher, brings in a motivational speaker for an afternoon, and congratulates himself on creating a mental health initiative.
Meanwhile, the people responsible for making everybody miserable are still running the fucking place.
One of the things that makes this especially difficult overseas is how much control the club can have over your life.
In a normal workplace, if you're having a problem with somebody, there are at least supposed to be procedures for dealing with it. Those procedures aren't always great, obviously, but there's generally some expectation that you can raise a concern without the person you're complaining about having complete authority over whether you're still employed next week.
Now imagine being an American basketball player living in a foreign country. Your coach controls your minutes, management controls your contract, and the team might be responsible for your apartment, car, and practically everything else that allows you to function in that country.
Who exactly are you supposed to complain to when one of those people is the problem?
And how much do you trust that your complaint won't suddenly become a discussion about your attitude?
I've watched the conversation around athletes turn into that pretty quickly. Somebody gets treated terribly, and before long people are questioning whether he's mentally tough enough to handle professional sports.
There are absolutely situations where players need to grow up, take criticism, and learn to handle difficult personalities. I've been that player myself, and I'd be lying if I suggested every uncomfortable situation I encountered was somebody else's fault.
But we should be able to acknowledge the difference between a coach demanding more from somebody and an environment that's genuinely damaging to the people living in it.
The researchers weren't studying established American imports in Europe or Asia, and this kind of survey can't tell us that every reported mental health symptom was caused by mistreatment. What it can do is make us examine how quickly we put responsibility on athletes to manage the consequences of somebody else's behavior.
I want players to be mentally tough. I want them to develop the confidence to handle adversity because professional basketball is full of it.
I'd also love to see organizations held to something resembling the same standard.
Imagine that.
MOVING TO ANOTHER COUNTRY IS A MENTAL HEALTH TRANSITION. APPARENTLY SOMEBODY FINALLY PUT THAT IN WRITING.
Research: Mental Health in Elite Athletes: International Olympic Committee Consensus Statement (2026)
British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2026
Read the complete IOC consensus statement
I had to laugh a little when I got to this one.
The International Olympic Committee published an updated consensus statement on athlete mental health, and among the many things they discussed was the impact of moving between countries and cultures during an athletic career.
Which, as somebody who spent years doing exactly that, struck me as a pretty important thing for somebody to finally acknowledge.
If you tell people you played professional basketball overseas, they usually want to hear about the places you visited, the people you met, and whatever ridiculous adventures you had along the way.
And that's fair. I got to see an enormous amount of the world while somebody paid me to play a game I loved. I still think about how lucky I was to have that opportunity.
What people don't generally ask about is how exhausting it can be to repeatedly start your entire life over.
I spent years living out of suitcases, trying to figure out how to function in places where I didn't speak the language and where the most ordinary things could become unnecessarily complicated.
Sometimes a club would have somebody waiting at the airport who helped you get settled. Other times, you'd get handed a set of keys and apparently that meant you were ready to become a functioning member of society.
Good luck, American. Practice is at six.
You're expected to learn an entirely new offense, adjust to a coach you've never met, and find a way to fit into a group of teammates who might have completely different ideas about how basketball should be played.
And while you're doing all of that, you're also trying to figure out where to buy groceries, whether the apartment has working heat, why your phone doesn't work, and how the hell you're supposed to get to the gym.
All pretty manageable things individually, I suppose. But when they happen simultaneously, in a language you barely understand, while people are judging whether you're worth the money they're paying you, it becomes a little more complicated.
The IOC statement identifies several major transitions that can affect an athlete's mental health, including changing teams, relocating to another country or culture, recovering from injury, getting cut, and eventually retiring.
Retirement has received plenty of attention in athlete mental health research, and rightfully so. Losing the identity you've spent your entire life building can be incredibly difficult.
But overseas athletes can go through some pretty significant upheavals while they're still playing.
I always thought one of the strangest things about being a professional basketball player abroad was how little connection there sometimes was between your basketball situation and your actual happiness.
You could be having the best season of your career and absolutely hate your life outside the gym. You could live in an incredible country, love everything about the place, and spend every waking moment dreading practice because the coach was a miserable asshole.
Or you could have a great team, wonderful teammates, a perfectly decent apartment, and still find yourself sitting alone on a Tuesday night wondering what everybody back home was doing.
And then, just when you'd finally figured everything out, the season would end.
You'd pack your belongings, head home for the summer, and potentially start the whole process over again somewhere else a few months later.
I became pretty good at it. Most guys who stick around overseas for any significant amount of time do.
But I wonder how often we confuse being good at handling something with that thing being particularly good for us.
The IOC's recommendations include confidential mental health care, qualified professionals, screening, and support through major career transitions. They also recognize the stigma and professional consequences athletes may fear when considering asking for help.
That last part is something I've thought about a lot.
Imagine you're an American import halfway through a difficult season. You haven't been sleeping, your family is thousands of miles away, and you've started feeling completely overwhelmed by everything happening around you.
Somebody suggests talking to the club about your mental health.
Okay. Great.
Now you've got to decide whether telling the people who employ you that you're struggling is going to improve your situation or give them another reason to start looking for your replacement.
And I know there are good organizations and good people working in professional basketball. I've played for them. I also know there are organizations where admitting you're having a hard time would feel like a pretty significant professional gamble.
That is an enormous amount of pressure to put on somebody who's already struggling.
It's one reason I think athlete support has to exist independently of the organizations making decisions about contracts and playing time.
Players should be able to speak openly with someone qualified to help them without wondering whether that conversation is going to make its way back to the general manager.
I'd love to see that relationship begin before an athlete ever leaves home.
Explain what relocating can feel like after the excitement wears off. Help them understand how to access mental health resources wherever they're headed. Give them somebody they can call when things start going sideways, preferably someone who doesn't have a financial interest in whether they stay on the team.
And don't disappear once they've signed their contract and arrived safely.
The excitement of being somewhere new can carry you through the first couple of weeks. It's often later, once you're settled into the routine and the novelty is gone, that being so far from home starts to wear on you.
Then there's the experience of getting released.
One day you're a professional basketball player with a contract, an apartment, teammates, and a life you've started building in another country.
The next day, somebody tells you the club is making a change.
Suddenly you're packing everything you own and figuring out where you're going to live.
In basketball terms, that's a roster move.
For the person going through it, it's considerably more than that.
I don't believe every player who moves overseas is destined to struggle with their mental health, and the IOC isn't suggesting that either. Some guys thrive in those environments. I loved enormous portions of that life.
But maybe we should stop assuming that simply because an athlete is capable of adapting to difficult circumstances, he should be expected to figure everything out by himself.
We put an awful lot of thought into helping players adjust to a new offensive system.
It would be nice if somebody spent a fraction of that energy helping them adjust to the rest of their lives.
TELLING ATHLETES TO SAVE MONEY IS APPARENTLY NOT ENOUGH. IMAGINE THAT.
Research: Financial Fitness: Behavioral Drivers of Money Management Among Athletes in India
Financial Planning Review, June 14, 2026
Read the complete open-access study
If there's one thing professional athletes have probably heard more often than anything else, it's that we need to be smarter with our money.
Save your money. Invest your money. Don't buy stupid shit. Don't let people take advantage of you. Make sure you're planning for life after basketball.
Excellent advice.
Anybody want to explain how?
Researchers from Goa University surveyed 252 active athletes in India to examine what influences their attitudes toward financial planning and how confident they feel managing their money.
About 84% of the participants were between 18 and 27, and just over 90% were male. The group included athletes at different competitive levels, so we're not talking about a collection of highly paid professionals with enormous contracts.
A couple of numbers immediately jumped out at me.
38.1% reported saving no money.
68.7% reported having no investments.
Now, before somebody starts lecturing these athletes about financial discipline, it's worth mentioning that roughly 65.5% reported earning less than 20,000 Indian rupees per month.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that somebody earning very little money might have a pretty difficult time saving much of it.
We have this tendency, especially when discussing athletes, to treat financial difficulties as evidence that somebody is irresponsible. And sure, athletes make irresponsible decisions. I've been around professional sports long enough to know that a decent paycheck doesn't automatically come with common sense.
But there's a pretty significant difference between somebody blowing a fortune on nonsense and somebody who never had enough money to begin with.
What interested me more about the study was the relationship between financial planning and how capable athletes felt managing their own money.
Researchers found that athletes with more positive attitudes toward financial planning, along with greater confidence in their ability to manage their finances, reported stronger intentions to plan financially.
Meanwhile, social expectations from people around them weren't statistically significant predictors in the model.
In other words, all those speeches about being responsible with money might not accomplish much if the person listening has absolutely no idea what they're supposed to do.
I started thinking about what it feels like to be a young American player signing his first professional contract overseas.
You're 23 years old. You've spent practically your entire life focused on basketball, and now somebody has offered you more money to play than you've ever earned doing anything else.
Maybe the apartment is included. Maybe you've got a car. Maybe there's a meal plan, or the club is covering some other expenses.
Sounds pretty fucking good.
But then you've got to figure out what you're responsible for paying, how taxes work when you're earning money in another country, whether the agent's percentage is being calculated properly, and how much money you should be putting away.
And that's assuming the club pays you when it's supposed to.
Anybody who has spent time playing overseas knows that a contract promising monthly payments and a club delivering monthly payments can occasionally be two completely different things.
So now our hypothetical 23-year-old is sitting in an apartment somewhere in Europe, trying to figure out his financial future while waiting for a paycheck that was supposed to arrive three weeks ago.
And somebody back home is telling him to make smart financial decisions.
Okay. With what information?
I think back to how much time we spent learning every possible detail about basketball. We watched film, studied opponents, learned offenses, and worked with coaches who could explain exactly what we needed to do to become better players.
Then we'd get paid, and apparently we were all just supposed to know how to manage the money.
For an overseas professional, income can be particularly unpredictable. You might earn a pretty good salary during the season and spend the summer without one, waiting to find out whether another team wants to sign you.
Maybe you get a better contract the next year. Maybe you get hurt. Maybe the team decides you aren't worth what they're paying you anymore. Maybe the organization runs into financial trouble and stops paying everybody.
There's a huge difference between planning around a predictable paycheck and managing money when you don't know where you'll be working six months from now.
That's why I think financial education for athletes has to become much more practical.
Instead of sitting a room full of young players down and telling them how important it is to save for retirement, hand them an actual overseas contract and start asking questions.
The salary looks great, but what do the terms mean? What happens if the team pays late? What are you responsible for financially? Who should review the contract before you sign it? How do you plan for an offseason when you might not have any income?
And while we're at it, let's explain how to identify the people who suddenly become very interested in helping you manage your money once they find out you're getting paid to play basketball.
Because there are plenty of those people too.
I don't want to oversell what this particular study tells us. The researchers measured financial attitudes, perceived control, and intentions, rather than following athletes for years to see whether they eventually accumulated wealth. Feeling confident about your financial decisions certainly doesn't guarantee you're making good ones.
Hell, some of the worst financial decisions in history have probably been made by people who felt incredibly confident about what they were doing.
But the research raises an important question about what we're really accomplishing when we tell young athletes to be financially responsible without teaching them how.
You can tell somebody to save money a thousand times. If that person doesn't understand their income, expenses, financial obligations, or available options, the advice isn't particularly helpful.
And when we eventually criticize athletes for making terrible financial decisions, I think it's worth asking whether anybody ever bothered to teach them how to make good ones.
SO HOW MUCH ARE WE EXPECTING ATHLETES TO FIGURE OUT ON THEIR OWN?
I kept coming back to that question while reading these studies.
Professional sports is an incredibly sophisticated business when it comes to preparing people to perform.
Teams employ coaches, trainers, doctors, analysts, and all sorts of specialists who spend their days trying to squeeze every possible advantage out of an athlete's abilities.
I played for organizations where people could tell me exactly how many rebounds I was averaging over the previous five games, where an opponent preferred to catch the ball, and which defensive adjustments might help us win on Saturday.
I appreciated that attention to detail. It's part of what makes professional sports professional.
But it's pretty remarkable how much of the rest of an athlete's life we're willing to leave up to chance.
We expect players to become mentally tough enough to deal with difficult environments, adapt to unfamiliar countries and cultures, and make intelligent financial decisions during a career that can end practically whenever somebody decides it should.
And if they struggle with any of those things, we have a wonderful collection of explanations about why they should have handled everything better.
Maybe they weren't tough enough. Maybe they couldn't adjust. Maybe they should have been smarter with their money.
There are times when those criticisms are fair. Athletes have responsibilities, and being talented at basketball doesn't excuse somebody from behaving like an adult.
But I think back to the number of situations I encountered during my career where I could have used a little guidance from somebody who understood the world I was living in.
Sometimes I needed advice. Sometimes I needed information. And sometimes I probably just needed to talk to another person who understood how ridiculous the whole situation was without having to spend twenty minutes explaining why I was upset in the first place.
That's a huge reason I started OverseasX.
I know what professional basketball can give somebody because it gave me an incredible life. I also know how confusing and isolating that same life can become when things aren't going particularly well.
And I know how quickly a player's circumstances can change.
You can spend months building a life somewhere and lose it in an afternoon because somebody decided to sign another American.
I don't think there's any realistic way to eliminate all the problems professional athletes encounter. Coaches are still going to be difficult, teammates are occasionally going to be assholes, and there will always be organizations that treat players poorly.
But I think we can do a hell of a lot better job preparing athletes for those situations and making sure they have somewhere to turn when they need help.
I'd love for a young player heading overseas to have access to experienced professionals who can help him understand his contract, figure out his financial responsibilities, and get settled in a country he's never visited.
And if that same player finds himself struggling a few months later, I want him to know there's somebody he can talk to who isn't responsible for deciding whether he gets another paycheck.
I want him to have the kind of information and support I wish I'd had at different points throughout my career.
There are a lot of things I miss about playing professional basketball overseas, and I'm grateful for almost every opportunity it gave me. Even some of the awful experiences eventually became pretty entertaining stories once enough time had passed and I was safely back home.
But there were plenty of situations that didn't need to be nearly as difficult as they were.
We can do something about that.
If you're playing overseas right now and dealing with something involving your team, your living situation, your mental health, or a financial decision you don't quite understand, reach out to us at OverseasX.
We've got people who understand this world, and if we can't answer your question ourselves, we can work on connecting you with somebody qualified who can.
I'd much rather hear from somebody who needs a little advice today than find out six months from now that they were dealing with something awful and had absolutely no idea where to turn.
With OverseasX, you'll never have to walk this journey alone.
THE RESEARCH I READ THIS WEEK
Psychological Violence and Mental Health Outcomes in NextGen Athletes: Moderating Role of Mental Performance Skills
Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 2026
Original research | PubMed abstract
Mental Health in Elite Athletes: International Olympic Committee Consensus Statement (2026)
British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2026
Financial Fitness: Behavioral Drivers of Money Management Among Athletes in India
Financial Planning Review, June 14, 2026
Research note: The two individual studies used observational surveys, meaning their findings identify relationships rather than establishing cause and effect. The IOC publication is an expert consensus statement. The overseas basketball examples and commentary are my interpretation of how these findings relate to professional athletes.