Highest & Lowest Earning Sports
There aren’t many people who would choose to become sports stars just because of the amount of money that they’d be able to earn. For every Premier League footballer who is being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds per week, there are plenty of low level footballers who earn less than the average wage for their age group and area. Sports have the ability to pay those taking part vast sums of money, but that is only when you’re looking at very specific sports and talking about the people that make it to the very top of the tree.
The reality of professional sports is that it is often very difficult to get a sense of how much money people are paid for their role. There will often be information leaked online about the contracts of the highest paid earners, but the actually average amount that people that take part in a specific sport isn’t something that can be spoken of with any certainty. Even so, there are some sports that earn more money as a whole than others, meaning that the people that take part in the top level of it can take home some good money if they’re lucky.
The Highest Paid Sports
There is no question that some sports pay more than others. If you had a child who was excellent at all sports, you’d want to encourage them to spend time trying to make it in the more lucrative sports in order to set them up for life.
Whilst this isn’t a sensible retirement plan, it is true to say that some people will definitely look to target their children in some sports precisely because of how much money they will earn if they manage to make it to the top. Here is a look at the sports that pay the most money, roughly speaking:
NBA Basketball
It is perhaps not all that surprising to see one of the most popular American sports on the list, though most people might have imagined that it would be American football that pays the most. The National Basketball Association has 30 teams that make up the top ranking league for the sport, which began paying its players large sums of money as long ago as the 1970s. In the years that followed, players became household names and earned the sort of money that goes with such a situation, adding more than just their sporting prowess to their list of accomplishments.
As an example, Michael Jordan earned a huge amount of money thanks to his position as one of the greatest basketball players ever, but he also developed his shoes with Nike in order to become one of the richest sports stars on the planet. He is believed to be worth more than $2 billion at the time of writing, which shows just how much money there is out there for the sports stars that become the very best at what they do. That is a very small pool of people, however, so don’t be expecting your child to hit those sorts of financial heights.
Average Salary At The Top: $7.3 million
Top Boxing
Boxing is a sport that requires a specific mindset in order to be successful at it. After all, you’re essentially risking your life every time you step into the ring against another fighter. Being hit in the head repeatedly might not seem like a particularly fun idea, but then the very best boxers would hope that they’ll be the ones doing the hitting. Despite its pugilistic nature, people absolutely love to watch boxers go head to head and are willing to pay large sums of money in order to watch others do exactly that, hence the success of the pay per view model.
That model also allows the biggest boxers to earn huge sums of money thanks to the fact that they will take a cut of the box office. Of course, that is only if the fighter is at the top of the pegging order or, at the very least, is considered to be worth spending money on to watch them fight. If you’re the best at what you do, you can earn as much as $10 million per fight, but those that are entry level boxers will be on a fraction of that. That is what makes it such a confusing sport to talk about, given the fact that it could be on both lists.
Average Salary At The Top: $5 million per fight
MLB Baseball
If you were to look at a list of the largest sports contracts paid in recent years, you would see that baseball players make up 16 of the top 20. If your hand – eye coordination is good enough to be able to hit a speeding ball very far, or to throw the ball quickly in the first place, then there’s a very good chance that you’ll be able to make yourself one of the richest people in sport. Indeed, the only people that break into that top 20 at the time are writing are Lionel Messi, who is the Greatest Of All Time in the world of football, a boxer, an American footballer and a racing car driver.
First played in the 18th century, baseball’s season concludes with the World Series, in spite of the fact that it only involves teams from North America. That being said, it is a sport that has grown in popularity over the years, being played in the likes of Japan and South Korea. Ultimately, though, if a baseball player wants to earn vast sums of money then they need to get themselves over to the United States of America and start playing Major League Baseball as soon as possible, for that is where the really big money is paid.
Average Salary At The Top: $4.41 million
Premier League Football
When it comes to global sports, there is no sport as universally popular as football. Unlike the World Series, which is rather insular in nature, the World Cup is watched by billions and every country with an association is able to enter it in the hope of being able to take part. For that reason, the players that make it to the top of the game are able to earn huge sums of money on a weekly basis, ensuring that they have enough money in the bank to be able to cope with life when they are no longer able to perform at the highest level.
In terms of the peak, there is little doubt that the Premier League is where players want to be playing. Though the likes of La Liga in Spain and Germany’s Bundesliga welcome large numbers of supporters through the door each year, those leagues just aren’t as popular as the English top flight. Teams like Liverpool and Manchester United are globally recognised, which is why sports washing nations have become involved with the Premier League at clubs like Manchester City and Newcastle United in recent years, knowing it is the perfect vehicle to rehabilitate their reputations.
Average Salary At The Top: £2.6 million (About $3.1 million)
NFL American Football
American football is a sport that many non-Americans struggle to understand. Aside from the fact that the coverage seems to involve more adverts than it does actual gameplay, the rules around it are so convoluted as to make it all but impenetrable to those that don’t have a friend or colleague to guide them through what is happening. Its popularity might seem to be entirely foreign to some, but there is no question that millions of people love to watch it and the likes of the Super Bowl are amongst the most watched sporting events on the planet.
That, of course, is the sort of information that a player’s agent is all to aware of when they step into the office of the team owner in order to begin negotiations over salaries. There are some players that are head and shoulders above the rest of the league, meaning that they’re able to demand astronomical fees. As with England and the Premier League for football, American football players want to get themselves to the United States of America and into the National Football League if they want to earn as much money as they possibly can.
Average Salary At The Top: $2.7 million
Formula One
On the one hand, anyone that has been driving down the M6 without a care for the laws of the road can driving a car really quickly. On the other, being able to drive a Formula One car quickly on some of the most difficult tracks in the world is an entirely different matter, which is why F1 drivers are paid such huge sums of money. If you want to put your skills of driving down the motorway really quickly to good use then you’ll want to try to get involved with the world of Formula One. Just don’t be surprised when you don’t make it anywhere near the top.
There is so much skill and ability involved in being an F1 driver that many people don’t even realise what it is that’s involved. The discipline shown by such drivers is something that cannot be over stated, which is why the team owners are so happy to spend huge sums of money on the best drivers in order to keep them happy. Max Verstappen might be a hateful person when you see him on the track, but he was one of only four people to break into the top 20 richest sports people in the world in 2022, showing his true worth.
Average Salary At The Top: £8.4 million (About $10.9 million)
PGA Golf
The final sport worthy of a mention in our top earners list is golf. Anyone that has ever played it to any level will know exactly how tough it is to get right. The idea of hitting a small ball long distances and then get it into a small hole is a mad one in the first place, but the skill level required to do it well is out of this world. Little wonder, then, that some of the best paid people in sports are golfers. Tiger Woods racked up wealth in region of $800 million thanks to his skill with a golf club, though it’s fair to say that he’s an outlier.
Even so, good golfers can win millions of dollars thanks to a few good rounds on the Professional Golf Association tour, winning prize money that other sports stars can only dream of. As with any sport, a golfer has to be at the top of their game in order to earn the truly eye watering amounts of money that we’re talking about. That being said, the launch of the LIV tournament, designed to sports wash the reputation of the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia, has allowed even mediocre golfers to earn a huge sum of money.
Average Salary At The Top: $1,485,055
The Lowest Paid Sports
The reality is that even some of the sports on the list above can appear on the list of the lowest paid sports. That is because there is a massive difference between what the very best in the world can earn when compared with what someone mediocre at what they do are able to earn. In boxing, for example, the vast sums of money are taken home by the stars that are able to sell the box office tickets for pay per view events, whereas a boxer just starting out will be on relative pittance until they earn a reputation as someone worth watching.
Rugby
Rugby is not a sport that is anywhere near as popular as football, though it still has its fans all around the world. Its lack of popularity perhaps helps to explain why the players aren’t paid all that much to take part in the matches, however, with the average salary for a Premiership rugby player in the United Kingdom coming in at between £100,000 and £150,000 a year. This will differ depending on the position that is being played, but it does give you a sense of the sort of amount that someone can be paid for being injured by other people on a regular basis.
Players in academies will earn less than £25,000, but this can be as much as quadrupled if they make it into the first team squad. The very best players will earn as much as £800,000 a year, but when you consider how far away that is from the average pay of even the lowest sport in the ‘highest paid sport’ bracket, it helps to show how low that is as an amount. Obviously most people would love to be paid nearly a million pound a year, but that sort of fee is reserved for only the most talented of the rugby players out there.
Average Salary: £150,000 (About $182,000)
Bowling
Forget the image that you might have in your head of kids rolling bowling balls down a guide and onto the lane; bowling is taken very seriously indeed by millions of people. Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean that its lucrative, however, and even the best of the best in the world of bowling don’t earn huge sums of money. Indeed, when players are just starting out and want to make a name for themselves in the Pro Bowlers Association, they have to pay in order to enter a regional tournament, shelling out about $200 for the chance to win up to $5,000.
To give you a sense of how much bowlers are likely to earn, the World Series of Bowling is a PBA event that lasts for ten days. There are five super tournaments that you can enter, costing $900 for the privilege. No bowler has ever won all five of the events, but if they did then the most that they’d walk away with would be $130,000. That is obviously not an amount to be sniffed at, but when you consider that the majority of Premier League footballers earn that in a week, it puts how much bowlers get into some sort of perspective.
Average Salary: About $50,000
Lower League Ice Hockey
Ice Hockey is a sport that could easily have featured on the list of the best paid sports, but that is if you make it into the National Hockey League. Players there are guaranteed a minimum salary of $525,000 at the time of writing, which isn’t a bad wage. In the minor leagues, however, it is an entirely different story. The East Coast Hockey League, for example, pays rookies $415 per week, raising to $460 for veterans. That means that, on average, players will take home in the region of $24,000 per year, which isn’t much.
If you drop down to the Federal Hockey League then that number goes down even more. Six teams play there, with the league offering a salary cap of a little over $5,000. That is the equivalent of $297 per week during a 56 game season, which lasts for seven months. In other words, around half what ECHL players will make and nowhere near what the top athletes in the bigger sports will take home. If you’re taking up a sport for the specific reason of making money, you might want to steer clear of ice hockey unless you’re the best of the best.
Average Salary: About $24,000
Lacrosse
Any sport in which the players need to work another job in order to pay the bills is likely to find itself on our list. When it comes to lacrosse, the players are not paid very well at all, even if they make it to the big leagues. There is a flat salary of $9,200 for rookies, which has the chance of going up to as much as $34,000 if they’re drafted into one of the sport’s franchises. Teams will often load up on rookies in order to keep their payroll as low as possible, which is why so many of the players need to do what they can to supplement their income.
Teams in the National Lacrosse League will also look to bring as many local players in as they can, which is done in order to try to keep their expenses as low as possible. If you don’t even get travel perks, it’s fair to say that you’re not going to be living your best life even if you play the sport that you love. In the world of Major League Lacrosse, the salary ranges from $10,000 to $25,000, so not exactly the sort of money that is going to be rivalling Lionel Messi at the top of the best paid player standings any time soon.
Average Salary: $35,000
Comparing The Various Sports
| Sport | Average Salary |
|---|---|
| Formula One | ~$10.9 million |
| Basketball | ~ $7.3 million |
| Boxing | ~£5 million per fight |
| Major League Baseball | ~4 million |
| NFL American Football | ~$2.7 million |
| Premier League Football | ~2.6 million |
| PGA Golf | ~$1.5 million |
| Rugby | ~$182,000 |
| Bowling | ~$50,000 |
| Lacrosse | ~$35,000 |
| Lower League Ice Hockey | ~$24,000 |
As we’ve flagged up a couple of times, it is absolutely worth pointing out that the pay received by players differs hugely even within sports. It is hardly completely fair to compare lower league ice hockey with the Premier League, for example, rather than with League Two players. Yet it does give you a sense of which sport has the higher ceiling and is therefore at least slightly useful to do.
The highest paid sports are also some of the most popular sports in the world, which is why the players are paid so much to be part of it. For the purposes of the comparison in the table above, we’ve written the salaries as they are roughly in dollars.
