Professional sports men and women are often worshipped by everyone else. That's got a lot to do with the fact that sports people seem to have found a way to live out their dreams – to play, effectively, for a living. The thing non sports people don't recognise, of course, is that there comes a time in every sports person's life when their career is threatened by the very thing that made them do it in the first place. Sports are uniformly dangerous occupations and injury is inevitable to all who take this profession. With sports insurance, that doesn't have to be a problem – without it, an injury can spell the end of a career.

How does having insurance make the difference between continuing and finishing a sporting career? It's all about time and money. Unless one is lucky enough to be employed by, say, a Premiership football club, whose coffers tend to be stuffed to bursting with doubloons, then one's employer can only carry one for so long during an injury. In basic terms: there's only so much money a club or manager can get hold of to "carry" a sports person through his or her injury. So, initial treatment might be paid for, and a little rehabilitation: but not enough to ensure that the injury is dealt with quickly enough and well enough making it possible for the injured to re-enter the game at the same level.

Sports insurance, on the other hand, provides practically unlimited fields of cover for any sporting injury: which means, if one is relying on a sport for one's income, that person will not only be given the proper treatment, but compensated for loss of earnings during that fallow period. A professional sports person may well be supporting a family on the wage he or she earns from his or her chosen game. When that income is removed, thanks to a long term injury, it becomes necessary to replace it. Replacing an income when one is supposed to be resting and recovering can involve exacerbating the injury – sometimes to such an extent that it never really heals. And that means farewell career.

Sports insurance protects against making injuries worse through partial treatment, too. For an injury to recover to the extent that a sports person can resume his or her career with any degree of success, it needs to be treated with extreme care and intense professionalism. Often, that requires extremely expensive equipment – and, for certain, private care. Only private medical attention can ensure that injuries are treated with the speed and care they need, if they are to heal perfectly (and perfect is the only option, for a sports person) – particularly during the secondary rehab phase of treatment, where the right treatment intervals are of paramount importance. Sports insurance pays for care that is determined, time and appointment wise, by the needs of the injury rather than the needs of a clinic: and that is the only way a sports injury can ever hope to heal well enough to allow a career to continue.

That, then, is how careers can be saved, or prolonged, with professional sports insurance packages. It's the only way to protect a sporting livelihood. So, any sports person out there not already covered, get to it.

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