Payments to former players from the Gene Upshaw NFL Player Health Reimbursement Account Plan surged in the two years at issue in Thursday’s federal indictment of 10 league retirees for allegedly defrauding the pool of $3.4 million in 2017 and 2018.
Payments to former players spiked 26 percent to $14.4 million in 2017, and then 45 percent to $20.9 million in 2018, according to a review by The Athletic of the plan’s Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) filings with the Department of Labor. That means the alleged fraud represented 11 percent of all payouts.
Even putting aside the amounts of alleged fraud, “these aren’t normal increases by any stretch of the imagination, so something very abnormal is going on,” said a sports insurance industry executive, who requested anonymity because of their firm’s work with the NFL. “There’s something here that’s a flashing… I don’t want to say red light, but there’s…
