Child Maintenance and Sport: A Game of Two Halves

The current framework for calculating child maintenance in England and Wales is, in many respects, built around the assumption of a conventional career.  It presumes a relatively stable income trajectory, one that rises gradually and persists until state retirement age, by which point children are typically no longer minors for whom child maintenance is being paid.  

For professional athletes, however, this model is fundamentally ill-suited – not only to the paying parent, but also to the child the system is designed to protect and support.

A similar issue was grappled with, in the context of spousal maintenance, in the excellent financial remedies journal article: A Question of Sport by Joseph Switalski, James Finch and Charles Collins (all of 29 Bedford Row), although stockpiling is not permitted for pure child maintenance claims.

A professional athlete may earn handsomely during their playing years, but those years are fleeting and nothing is a given, a career can come to an end very abruptly.  The average career of a Premier League footballer, for instance, spans roughly eight to ten years at the highest level.  A cricketer’s career may be longer, but a boxer or gymnast may have an even shorter window.  When child maintenance is assessed on the basis of peak earnings, the resulting obligation (which will likely be determined by agreement or, absent agreement, by the Family Court given the sums involved) can be extraordinarily high during the athlete's active career, only to plummet once retirement arrives — often when the athlete is still in their thirties.  At this moment, the paying parent can apply to the Child Maintenance Service (CMS) to significantly reduce their child maintenance obligations.  The consequence is that the child then faces a dramatic and destabilising drop in their standard of living.  This is plainly not in the child's best interests.  Moreover, the CMS methodology (at least in the first instance on a CMS assessment) or a James v Seymour approach do not adequately reflect the paying parent’s ability to pay from accrued capital (see Navigating the Child Maintenance Service - Frequently Asked Questions).

Equally, the paying parent is placed in an unenviable position. Unlike a white collar professional with a desk job, whose earnings may sustain them over a forty-year career, the athlete may need to stretch a decade's worth of income across an entire lifetime.  A single year of high earnings may, in practical terms, need to fund three or more years of that individual's life.  To assess maintenance purely on the basis of current income, without accounting for this compressed earning period, is to ignore economic reality. Upon retirement, it potentially risks leaving the paying parent with a choice between seeking to vary the arrangements, causing disruption to the child and, more often than not, ill-feeling between parents, or paying at a rate that may no longer be affordable at a stage when re-entering the workforce at a comparable level is simply not possible.

What children need above all else is consistency. Lavish provision during boom years, which is later radically changed, is anathema to that.  A maintenance framework that avoids sharp peaks and troughs is imperative when considering an outcome that best meets the welfare and financial needs of minor children.

There is a strong argument for a more nuanced approach — one that smooths the athlete's income over their expected lifetime, rather than assessing it year by year. Such an approach would better serve the child (and parent with care) by providing stable, enduring support, whilst also treating the paying parent fairly by recognising the unique financial realities of a short but lucrative professional career.