Hello Scorum community! Satoshi here. Today we are looking at the world’s highest-paid athletes in 2018. Forbes Magazine looked at athlete earnings over the past 12 months and ranked them. They tallied athlete salaries, winnings, and endorsement earnings to develop their list. As before, I took the data and did various visualizations in order to see what kind of insights would emerge.
Earnings data for this came from Forbes Magazine (https://www.forbes.com/athletes/) and age data came from wikipedia.
And with that, let’s get into it!
This year, Floyd “Money” Mayweather certainly lives up to his moniker getting the #1 rank on the list, earning a whopping $285 million dollars coming off his fight with MMA fighter Conor McGregor in August of 2017. Mayweather earned more than twice that of the second place finisher on this list - Lionel Messi, who earned $111 million dollars. Nipping at Messi’s heels is Cristiano Ronaldo (#3)- who actually topped this list in 2017 and 2016, but earned a reported $108 million dollars this year. Rounding out #100 on the rich list is French NBA player Nicolas Batum earning $22.9 million dollars, suggesting a cut-off point of roughly $23 million dollars to make it onto the list.
Plot 1 shows the distribution of total earnings of the athletes on our list. Total earnings are split between salary/winnings and endorsement deals.
Lebron James, ranked #6 on our list earned a total of $85.5 million dollars. Of this total, he earned $33.5 million from his player salary, but he also made $52 million dollars from endorsement deals. He is one of a handful of players on this list who made more from endorsements than their player salaries. Another such player is #7 on the list, tennis pro - Roger Federer who earned, $12 million and $65 million from winnings and endorsements, respectively. Other individuals who earn more from endorsements than salaries/winnings include, golfers - Tiger Woods (#16) and Phil Mickelson (#22), tennis star - Kei Nishikori (#35) and the Olympic sprinter - Usain Bolt (#45). From those last group of players, they earn upwards of 90% percent of their total earnings from endorsements.
Plot 2 shows the age distribution of athletes on our list. The average age on the list was 30.4 years old. We can see that the players ages have the highest concentration in the late 20’s and early 30’s. This graph suggests that most athletes on this list are in their 30’s and we will see from Plot 3 that earnings potential tends to peak when athletes are in their early to mid 30’s. Certainly, after the mid-30’s our list tapers off as many athletes reach past their prime and retire. The youngest athlete on our list is Greek NBA player, Giannis Antetokounmpo (#30) who is 23 years old (!) . Meanwhile, the oldest player on the list is pro-golfer - Phil Mickelson (#22), coming in at 48 years young (!).
Plot 3 is probably my favorite of this particular series of graphs. A relationship between age and earnings becomes apparent. We see a high concentration of athletes earning in the $25 to $50 million dollar range. Indeed, 82 out of 100 athletes earned $50 million dollars or less. Only 12 athletes earned more than $50 million dollars.
Most notably, certain outliers emerge from the data set. Mayweather certainly is in a league of his own here in both earnings ($285 million!!) and age (41 years). He was the third oldest athlete on the list and one of 3 athletes in their 40’s.
Neymar emerges as the top earner in his 20’s. We see from the plot that he has a sizeable earnings lead away from other athletes in his age range. As he approaches his 30’s, if he continues his current trajectory, he will most likely reach the earnings potential of his other soccer compatriots - Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Finally, with Plot 4, we have the sports distribution of the athletes on the list. The NBA certainly makes their mark here as 40 spots on the list are basketball players.
Unfortunately, NHL players and Nascar drivers did not make the earnings list. Though, Formula 1 drivers, Lewis Hamilton (#12), Sebastian Vettel (#18), and Fernando Alonso (#39) make it.
Mixed martial arts gets lone representation with Conor McGregor at #4, who also earned big from his fight with Mayweather. A lone cricket player, Virat Kohli (#83), from India also appears.
And finally, Usain Bolt (#45) represents the lone track athlete on the rankings.
Final Thoughts
By plotting the data, there was many things that emerged! Forbes does this ranking every year and it’s always interesting to see who the highest-paid athletes are.
Finally, I want to thank everyone for their support and comments in my first article about Scorum’s first month. It certainly gave me motivation to continue doing these data visualizations and analysis. These visualizations and write-ups take many hours to do, so it’s nice to see people read and enjoy them.
Thank you for your support and thank you for reading!
-Satoshi
Author’s Notes:
- Earnings data was from https://www.forbes.com/athletes/ and age data was from wikipedia.
- Earnings data and age data was put into google sheets, cleaned up and plotted in R Studio, and made presentable in Adobe InDesign.
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