Sportico released its highest-paid athletes list this week, with Cristiano Ronaldo topping the ranking for the second straight year. Perhaps more notable than who made the list, though, was the dollar figures next to those names.
The top 100 earned a collective $6.2 billion in 2024, roughly double the total of $3.1 billion from 2017, when the rankings were published by Forbes using a similar methodology. The cutoff to make the list has also risen 75% from $21.4 million in 2017 to $37.5 million this year. CPI inflation, meanwhile, is just 30% during that span.
Earnings off the court, field, track or course have grown 57% over the past seven years, but the salary and prize money component of the total has skyrocketed from $2.2 billion to $4.8 billion. In the NBA and NFL, richer media rights deals have sent league-wide revenue and, subsequently, payrolls through the roof.
The number of basketball players in the top 100 has doubled from 18 in 2014 to 36 in 2024. The NBA’s salary cap is up 140% in the past decade, and the league recently signed a package of broadcasting deals worth more than twice the previous bunch, which is expected to double the cap again within the next 10 years.
Football has also seen growth from 17 to 22 entries on the list, with the NFL’s salary cap rising 92% over the past decade and teams shelling out a higher percentage of that cap for top quarterbacks than they used to.
In other sports, the influx of Middle Eastern money has boosted athlete pay. Ronaldo commanded a $215 million annual salary when he made the move to Saudi Pro League club Al Nassr, and other top soccer players have joined him. Boxers Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk raked in nine figures each for their two fights in Saudi Arabia in 2024. LIV Golf lured many top golfers over to its startup tour in 2022 with eye-popping signing bonuses, which in turn forced the PGA to raise its prize money to keep up.
The odd sport out is baseball, which had just 11 athletes on the list in 2024, down from 27 in 2014. Although MLB has no salary cap or max contract value, it also does not have a salary floor, and teams have become much more wary of committing large sums of money to aging players. Comparatively, MLB’s average salary has barely budged (+21%) in the past decade.
Amidst this explosion in athlete earnings, however, remember that there is no reason to shed a tear for those paying them. NBA and NFL franchise valuations are up 94% and 93%, respectively, in just the past four years, and Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund has more than $900 billion in total assets under management.
