The Lloyd’s of London connection behind the 2026 World Baseball Classic — and what it means for commercial policyholders in specialty insurance markets
The 2026 World Baseball Classic, which concluded this past March in Miami with Venezuela’s first-ever title, featured many of the best baseball players on earth. Aaron Judge, Bryce Harper, and Paul Skenes suited up for Team USA. Shohei Ohtani hit for Japan. Juan Soto and Manny Machado represented the Dominican Republic. But the tournament’s most consequential participant may have been a company most fans have never heard of: National Financial Partners, the insurance broker approved by Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association to arrange coverage for player contracts during WBC participation.
NFP’s underwriting decisions, issued in the weeks before rosters were finalized, left a reported 168 of approximately 700 evaluated players without coverage — including Francisco Lindor, Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve, Mike Trout, and Elly De La Cruz. Puerto Rico, which was hosting pool play in San Juan for the first time since 2013, threatened to withdraw from the tournament after as many as eight to 10 of its projected roster players were denied coverage. Bad Bunny — the most-streamed recording artist on the planet — personally attempted to procure a separate policy for Lindor and Correa through an alternative carrier. The proposal did not satisfy the program’s approval structure.
Surprisingly, an insurance coverage dispute meaningfully shaped the competitive field of a major international sporting event. But the dynamics that produced this outcome are not all that surprising; they will be familiar to any business that has found itself dependent on a single approved insurer in a specialty market.
A Market of One
The WBC is baseball’s answer to the World Cup — an international tournament, first held in 2006, in which national teams composed largely of active major leaguers compete during spring training. Since the tournament’s inception, MLB and the Players Association have channeled all player insurance through a single broker rather than letting each club procure its own coverage. NFP evaluates every player on a 40-man roster who wants to participate, reviews his medical history through a HIPAA release, and makes a binary recommendation — covered or not. The WBC pays the premiums. For covered position players, the policy guarantees two years of salary; for pitchers, four years. The coverage protects the players’ MLB clubs, not the players themselves; if a covered player is injured during the tournament, the policy reimburses the club for the salary it is contractually obligated to pay during the recovery period.
The sports press has treated these coverage decisions as though NFP itself were the insurer — a single company deciding, on its own balance sheet, whether to accept the risk of a $200 million baseball contract. The actual structure is more interesting than the sports press has made it look. NFP acquired Pro Financial Services in 2007, a Chicago-based firm that the SEC filing announcing the deal described as “the premier managing general underwriter of sports disability insurance in the country.” PFS still operates under the NFP umbrella, reports that it underwrites over $6 billion of coverage annually across league-wide programs for all four major North American professional sports leagues, and identifies its carrier partners on its own website: Lloyd’s of London and Everest Re. It may be the most consequential company in professional sports that has never been mentioned on SportsCenter. PFS displays the Lloyd’s “Coverholder” designation — Lloyd’s term for an entity that has been granted delegated underwriting authority by one or more Lloyd’s syndicates to evaluate risks and bind coverage on their behalf.
In other words, when NFP covers a WBC player, it is almost certainly not bearing the financial risk itself. No public source identifies the specific carriers on the WBC program, but PFS’s coverholder status, its disclosed insurer relationships, and its documented role as the dominant sports disability underwriter in the country make Lloyd’s syndicates and Everest the most probable risk-bearers. And when the underwriting criteria tightened for 2026 — the new age-37 cutoff, the more aggressive “chronic” classification — the most likely explanation is that the carriers tightened the terms of their binding authority agreements after absorbing significant losses in 2023, and PFS implemented those revised terms.
Insurance practitioners will recognize this structure immediately. Lloyd’s coverholders and managing general agents sit at the center of some of the thinnest and most consequential insurance markets in the commercial world. Directors-and-officers liability — one of the three classes where Lloyd’s itself has identified the greatest underwriting uncertainty — is frequently placed through Lloyd’s syndicates via coverholders with delegated binding authority, and when securities class-action frequency spikes — as it did in the hardening cycle that began in 2020 — the syndicates tighten their terms and the corporate policyholder discovers at renewal that the coverage it relied on last year is no longer available on the same terms. Lloyd’s imposed similar market-wide restrictions in cyber insurance in 2022 and 2023, requiring syndicates to exclude state-backed cyberattack losses, and the same thin-market, single-coverholder architecture governs environmental liability, political risk, and event cancellation.
The WBC program followed the same pattern: consistent coverage, stable terms, no reason to question the arrangement, and no particular incentive for anyone to look behind the curtain at who was actually bearing the risk. Until 2023.
Mets closer Edwin Díaz tore his patellar tendon during an on-field celebration and missed the entire MLB season. The policy covered his salary of $17.25 million. Jose Altuve fractured his thumb after being hit by a pitch representing Venezuela and missed the Astros’ first 43 games; the policy covered a prorated share of his approximately $29 million salary as well. The concentrated losses from a single tournament played over a few weeks were, by any measure, significant — the kind of loss event that, in the Lloyd’s market, leads to revised binding authority terms at the next renewal.
That pattern fits what followed. For the 2026 cycle, NFP introduced a hard age cutoff at 37. It implemented a three-tier injury classification — “low risk,” “intermediate,” and “chronic” — and players with multiple surgeries, recent 60-day IL stints, or offseason procedures were flagged. The underwriting logic was blunt. As one person with knowledge of the process told Yahoo Sports: “The insurance company is insuring the contract, not the player.” Lindor, with six years and $204.6 million left on his deal, was denied. Byron Buxton, who carried a far smaller remaining guarantee at three years and $45.4 million, was approved, despite his own significant injury history. Ohtani was cleared to hit but not to pitch, his two elbow surgeries making the pitching exposure unacceptable while the hitting risk fell within tolerance. The most valuable player in baseball was, for insurance purposes, two separate risks.
For most affected players, the practical consequences were severe. Because NFP is the only approved broker for the WBC program — and because MLB and the Players Association have generally declined to approve alternative carriers — there was no readily available competing provider within the program to absorb the risk NFP declined to write. A limited secondary market does exist, as discussed below, but for the players with the largest contracts and the most complex medical histories, the program’s single-broker structure left them with few practical options.
What Happens After a Denial
The players who were denied coverage faced a set of choices that will be recognizable to any commercial policyholder who has received a non-renewal or a coverage restriction at the worst possible time.
The most straightforward option was self-retention. The Arizona Diamondbacks let Carlos Santana play for the Dominican Republic without insurance, accepting exposure to his $2 million salary. A franchise worth well over a billion dollars can stomach that bet. The calculus changes when the exposure is Lindor’s $204.6 million or Correa’s approximately $200 million remaining guarantee.
A second path was to find alternative coverage outside the program. Todd Simkin of River’s Edge told Sportico that his firm wrote a small number of WBC policies for players whose coverage through NFP had been declined. But the WBC program requires that any insurer be approved by both MLB and the Players Association, and alternative carriers have generally not received that approval. Bad Bunny’s effort to place coverage for Lindor and Correa through an unapproved carrier failed on precisely this basis — the coverage existed in the market, but it did not satisfy the program’s requirements.
The third option was to sit out. Lindor, Correa, Altuve, and Trout all declined to play. All four wanted to represent their countries. Their teams would not carry the uninsured risk, and no approved alternative coverage was available.
There was, however, a fourth option.
The Value of Pushing Back
An underwriting denial in a specialty program is not always the final word. After the initial wave of denials, MLB and the Players Association lobbied NFP to reconsider, and some denials were reversed — Puerto Rico relievers Jovani Morán and Luis Quiñones, among others, were ultimately approved after initially being refused. That reversal illustrates something important: The initial denials were underwriting judgments, not metaphysically inevitable actuarial conclusions, and they changed when met with informed, timely pushback. The players and teams who accepted the denials at face value lost their opportunity to compete. Not every escalation succeeded, but at least some of those who pressed the issue — with documentation, advocacy, and institutional pressure — got a different answer.
For commercial policyholders, the practical takeaway is that a denial from a specialty program coverholder is worth interrogating, not accepting. Whether you have a legal remedy, as opposed to a negotiating position, depends on the governing contract, the program structure, and applicable state law; some jurisdictions recognize good-faith constraints on underwriting discretion, and others do not. But the coverholder structure adds a further layer of complexity that favors the party who acts early. The entity issuing the denial may be exercising authority delegated by carriers whose actual risk appetite is not visible to you, and understanding the division of authority between the coverholder and the carrier — including the binding authority agreement that defines the scope of the coverholder’s discretion — can open doors that would otherwise remain closed.
Jovani Morán walked through one. Initially denied coverage, he was approved after MLB and the MLBPA intervened on Puerto Rico’s behalf. He pitched three games in San Juan.