Most players are expected to get far less than millions. A sliding scale reduces the payouts for players who were in the league fewer than five years and players who are older than 45, and the players could spend months trying to get approved, all while the interest on their loans is piling up.

Players who fail to qualify for cash settlements, however, do not have to repay what they borrow, a substantial risk for the lenders.

“If the case doesn’t get won, the money doesn’t get paid back,” said Kelly Gilroy, the executive director of the American Legal Finance Association, which represents about 40 lenders. She estimated that about 25 percent of presettlement loans result in a loss to the lender because the settlement did not come through.

Lenders take the chance that some loans will not be repaid because they make sizable profits from their other clients. Most presettlement loans are for small amounts, like when a person in a car accident needs $5,000 to pay hospital bills while awaiting an insurance payout. As a rule of thumb, companies lend about 10 percent of what they expect the plaintiff to be awarded.

Lenders are raising that threshold to 25 percent or higher for N.F.L. players, not just because they could receive six- and seven-figure settlements, but because the N.F.L. has published a grid detailing the range of potential awards, something normally unavailable or confidential in other cases.

Ron Sinai, who works for Nova Legal Funding, a company in Los Angeles that finds clients for presettlement lenders, said this information gives companies more assurance when lending to players. “The N.F.L. is very careful about its image and wants to get this headache over with and pay out as soon as possible,” he said.

Sinai said lenders charged higher interest rates than banks because making nonrecourse loans, as they are known, was riskier. Unlike a traditional loan, the collateral is the settlement itself.