Filip Krušlin on 20 Years, Five Countries, and Knowing When the End Is Near

Good morning,

Filip Krušlin is 37 and playing his 20th professional season. He told me he wakes up feeling 57, and twenty minutes later he feels fine.

I met Filip through foreign exchange, oddly enough. A mutual contact introduced us when he needed to move money between countries. Then I looked into his career and realised what a story it was.

Twenty years. Five countries. Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Italy, now France. Mostly in four-year stretches, because he moves as a family or not at all.

The part that stayed with me was how openly he talked about the end. He knows it's close. No psychologist back when he was doubting himself at 23, so he learned to sit with it alone. Now he is planning the next chapter while he can still choose it.

There is also a sharp passage on NIL money, and why a college millionaire can struggle to accept a European contract.

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The AUD just dropped. Your overseas pay just went up.

No new contract. No bonus. No extra minutes.

Your overseas pay just bought you more at home.

Here is what happened.

At 11:30 yesterday, Australia's inflation numbers landed. CPI came in at 4.0% for the year. The market expected 4.3%.

Cooler than forecast. And lower than last month.

The read is simple. Less heat in inflation means less pressure on the RBA to keep rates high. Lower rates make a currency less attractive to hold.

So the Aussie dollar dropped. Quickly.

Here is where it sits right now.

AUD/USD: 0.6892, down 0.34% on the day. It is now sitting right on its 200 day moving average. That is the line a lot of traders watch. Hold it and the Aussie steadies. Lose it and the next leg gets interesting.

Now the part that matters if you are playing overseas.

A weaker Aussie dollar is not bad news for you. It is the opposite.

You earn in pounds, dollars, euros or yen. You have costs, family or savings back home in AUD. When the Aussie falls, every one of your foreign pay packets converts to more dollars at home.

Same contract. Same salary. More AUD landing in the account.

Quick example. A player earning 10,000 USD a month. Back in mid May that converted to roughly 13,800 AUD. This morning the same 10,000 lands closer to 14,500. Nothing changed in his deal. The currency did the work. Over a season that gap is real money.

One caveat, because one number never tells the whole story.

The RBA watches the trimmed mean, not the headline. That measure actually came in slightly firmer than expected. And tomorrow morning we get Australian jobs data. A strong print there could pull some of this move back.

So this is not a reason to rush. It is a reason to pay attention.

The players who do well with this are not the ones guessing the bottom. They are the ones who decided in advance how they wanted to handle their money before the number ever landed.

That is the whole game.

If you want to talk through how you are handling your conversions this season, that is what we do at sportsfx.co.

In case you missed these recent episodes:

Episode 22 — Travis McAvene
NIL money, the overseas pay cliff, and recruiting athletes who actually last. The business of getting paid to play basketball abroad, from a man who sits on the recruiting side of the table.

Episode 21 — Chloe Logarzo
Thirteen years, five countries, and the 4-day contract window into Sweden. The honest education on what going overseas actually looks like for a young female pro.

Episode 20 — Christopher Grant
Twelve years in Cambodia, eight years building a club from the inside, and why the recruitment conversation goes both ways.

That's it for this week.

If any of this is relevant to where you are right now — a contract coming up, a transfer to manage, or just starting to think about what going overseas actually involves financially — I'm always happy to talk it through.

If someone forwarded this to you, subscribe free here:

See you next week.

Chris