The median salary is $700,000. The average career lasts 3 years. Therefore you could say a typical player makes around $2 million playing football. That's gross. The net is probably about half of that. To most of America that will make an order of magnitude less than that in the same time, that sounds pretty good.

   Three years of that is not never work again money.

It's worth noting that three years of that gets you a bit over median household income at safe extraction (i.e. 4%) rate.

It's not FU money, but as an emergency fall back it is obviously plausibly never work again money.