Sports stars are professional athletes who generate billions of dollars per year through multiple forms of revenue. Thus, players are paid high salaries by their teams for their skills, personality and entertainment value. Moreover, each sport has many leagues with quite contrasting pay brackets for players. This article gives a brief overview of which sports league pays the highest salaries globally.
Top Formula 1 drivers, like Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, earn far more than the average, with annual salaries often exceeding $30 million. Their total income can be considerably higher when factoring in sponsorship deals and bonuses. Additionally, each race in the Formula 1 calendar is set in a different country, meaning the sport attracts a truly international audience, which helps to drive up broadcasting revenues and, by extension, driver salaries.
Highest Paid Sport
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The average salary of NBA players is $10,821,680 annually. The highest earners in the NBA enjoy salaries exceeding $40 million per season, not including endorsement deals. Top-tier basketball players often sign sponsorship agreements with shoe companies, sports drinks, and clothing lines, significantly boosting their earnings.
In 2021, for example, LeBron James and Stephen Curry both made more from endorsements than from their NBA salaries. This sport has also been gaining popularity in other parts of the world, including Europe and Asia, further increasing its global revenue.
In the NFL, quarterbacks often earn the highest salaries, with top players like Joe Burrow and Justin Herbert earning over $50 million per season. In addition to their salaries, players can make money from signing, performance, and roster bonuses. The average NFL salary is $2.8 million dollars annually.
While average earnings for professional golfers stand at $1,485,055 million annually, elite players earn much more. Moreover, top golfers earn more from endorsements and sponsorships than tournament winnings, with deals encompassing golf equipment, apparel, and even luxury watches and cars.
Conor McGregor tops the list in MMA, earning $37.5 million per year when his 16 years of fighting and $600 million career earnings are averaged out. His earnings are a mix of fight purses, pay-per-view shares, and endorsements from brands like Reebok and Beats by Dre. Conor McGregor also owns several pubs in Dublin.
Boxing is unique in earnings as it heavily depends on the appeal of individual fights. Major bouts attract enormous pay-per-view audiences, leading to substantial earnings. Additionally, endorsement deals and coaching opportunities after retirement contribute to the overall income of professional boxers. The median salary of a pro boxer is just $51,370.
Broadcasting rights have become a major revenue generator in sports. Leagues and tournaments sell these rights to broadcasters who televise the events, bringing in millions, sometimes billions, of dollars. This surge in revenue from broadcasting rights has significantly contributed to making sports some of the highest-earning industries.
The sports industry continues to evolve rapidly, fueled by emerging markets, innovative media platforms, and the burgeoning esports sector, which presents a future where sports revenue streams will be more diverse and potentially more profitable than ever.
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This is a list of the largest sports contracts. These figures include signing bonuses but exclude options, buyouts, and the endorsement deals. This list does not reflect the highest annual salaries or career earnings, only the top 100 largest contracts and thus is largely limited to athletes in team sports and auto racing. Athletes in individual sports, such as golf, tennis, table tennis, boxing, kickboxing, and MMA, are not employed by a team and usually earn money primarily through event winnings. This list also does not necessarily reflect actual money collected by the athletes, since some contracts are eventually terminated (usually due to an athlete either retiring or invoking an opt-out clause). Alex Rodriguez, Steven Strasburg, Manny Machado, Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, Deshaun Watson and Giannis Antetokounmpo are on the list two times each.
Entries in this list also require an individual citation of the contract, so a number of the highest salaried athletes (according to Forbes) are not included as their contract details have not been officially confirmed, including the likes of Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, and Lewis Hamilton. This also skews the list towards sports with salary caps where salaries are therefore public knowledge and easy to cite.
The contract figures referenced below are presented at face value and do not reflect potential pre or post-tax treatments. For example, contracts with European sports teams are typically quoted on a post-tax basis.
Basketball is the highest paid sport in the world, with the average annual salary in the NBA in 2023 being nearly $10.5 million. This is more than double the average salary in the NFL, which sits in second place at $4.5 million.
American leagues dominate the charts with 4 of the top 5 being in the US. European soccer leagues aren't far behind though with the English Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1 all making the top ten.
NBA teams dominate this list - even more so than previous years with NBA salaries continuing to surge some soccer teams have had to scale back on player wages due the impact of COVID on their finances.
The NFL pays out the highest amount of total salaries in the world with a whopping collective of $6.7 million in 2022! This is shared among all 1,486 players in the NFL making the overall average salary for a player in the NFL just over $4.5 million.
However, the average is heavily skewed by the biggest contracts in the league. The median salary for an NFL player is $860,000, which, while still an obscene amount of money, paints a more accurate picture of the typical compensation for an NFL player.
The WNBA has historically had a payment gap from their colleagues in the NBA and that issue does not seem to be going away anytime soon. Players in the NBA made on average three hundred and thirty-eight times as much money as their colleagues in the WNBA.
Inevitably this pay gap brings to light issues of a gender pay gap and those concerns are valid but there is also the fact that realistically the WNBA is not as popular as the NBA. Players in the MLS also have a revenue problem that is tied to their popularity issues. Hopefully, in time both the WNBA and MLS will increase their popularity in the coming years and decades.
While momentous Pay-Per-View fights can bring in big bucks from advertisement and sponsorship deals, professional boxers still must generally pay for their own travel, management fees, and training sessions.
A Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) athlete can make almost twice as much money as a boxer. With an average annual salary of $68,500, many MMA fighters must also rely on sponsorships and big fights if they want to make the injury-prone sport more lucrative.
Experience matters for MMA fighters. The number of previous fights, the frequency of their fights, and, of course, their overall popularity all factor into how rewarding the ruckus in the cage can be for fighters.
Still, on average, NASCAR drivers can round up close to $1 million per year. With an average base salary of around $200,000, supplemented by bonuses for top finishes, drivers also rely on endorsement deals and sponsorships.
Golf is one of the most peaceful, serene sports in the world, with athletes competing on sprawling courses of luscious greenery, pristine ponds, and thousands of eager fans awaiting each swing and putt.
However, the NHL shortened the 2020-2021 season to 56 games. With fewer games, both the league and the athletes saw a decline in earnings, as more than70% of NHL revenue comes from ticket sales, concessions, and sponsorships in arenas.
By signing a two-year contract extension worth $66 million (which included a $30 million signing bonus), Cousins takes home a paycheck that is well beyond what most professional athletes will ever see.
While not as popular in America as it is throughout the rest of the world, soccer is one of the highest-paying sports on the planet with a long list of athletes who are household names in hundreds of countries.
For example, in China, top soccer players in the Chinese Super League can earn over $1 million a year. On the other hand, the average Chinese person only makes about $6,500 per year. A player in the Chinese Super League will make that much in just 2 days, 6 hours, and 43 minutes.
But Ronaldo is the current king of soccer salaries, earning a cool $105 million for the year. With a large portion of that amount ($45 million) coming from endorsements, Ronaldo's earning potential is almost limitless.
Aside from keeping themselves alive, drivers are also paid to make the most of vehicles that can cost well over $100 million to build. For goliaths like Mercedes and Ferrari, the cost to develop and build these land rockets can be closer to $400 million.
With only 30 teams in the league and an unrivaled system in place to make money through television, sponsorships, merchandising, and, of course, ticket sales, the NBA is the king of money-making in the sports world.
The list of ESPN Top Salaries in Sports 2011 had baseball and boxing with the highest individual salary in that year. In another calculation described below, we analyzed the Forbes list of the highest-paid athletes from 1990-2010, and determined which sports were most prevalent on the lists. We found basketball ranked highest. 152ee80cbc
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