💯 How much the 100th Best Athlete in Each Sport Makes

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I’ve often wondered what life is like for those athletes “in the middle of the pack”.

Not just the elite athletes at the top of the game, but the athletes who are Ranked #100 or below.

Well, today I have done an analysis. How much does the 100th ranked athlete make and how does it compare to those in #1?

Before we dive in, we have to identify who those athletes are. Fortunately, it’s easy for Tennis…

• #1 Ranked Tennis Player: Novak Djokovic

• 2023 Earnings: $15,952,044

At the time of writing this piece the #1 player in the world is Novak Djokovic. In 2023 he made $16m taking his career earnings over $150m, the most of anyone ever.

The 100th ranked Tennis player in the world however is Fabio Fognini, the Italian clay court maestro.

Interestingly I couldn’t find how much he made in 2023 but I could in 2022.

Fabio is now 37 years old but still made $1,159,526 in 2022 with 30% of his takings coming from Doubles tennis.

Interestingly, outside of the bolded I wasn’t too familiar with the players Ranked 80 to 100:

81. Jakub Mensik

82. Daniel Altmaier

83. Roberto Bautista Agut

84. Aleksandar Kovacevic

85. Taro Daniel

86. Maximilian Marterer

87. Emil Ruusuvuori

88. James Duckworth

89. Borna Coric

90. Arthur Cazaux

91. Constant Lestienne

92. Yannick Hanfmann

93. Stan Wawrinka

94. Thanasi Kokkinakis

95. Lloyd Harris

96. Juncheng Shang

97. Aslan Karatsev

98. Rinky Hijikata

99. Botic van de Zandschulp

100. Fabio Fognini

But that didn’t stop me pocket watching. Look at the career earnings to date for three of the players in this range:

• Emil Ruusuvori is 25 and has earned $3,852,163 to date

• Aslan Karatsev is 30 and has earned $5,033,879

• Stan Wawrinka is 39 and has earned $36,865,648

This tells me that being a Top 100 Tennis player still allows you to live a fruitful life, and maintain a level of anonymity. 

Tennis is an unforgiving sport. There is a massive underbelly of tennis players under the Top 100 that really struggle. There’s a lot of travel and you have to pay coaches, nutritionists, managers a slice of any earnings you generate.

It must not be easy when a lot of your “success” is hoping on a favourable draw in a Grand Slam to make some money.

Which is very similar to Golf.

• #1 Ranked Golf Player: Scottie Scheffler

• 2023 Earnings: $21,014,342

Last year, Scottie broke the record for the most amount of money made by a golfer in a single season. He made $21,014,342 on the PGA Tour and was literally merking everyone. The scary thing is the run has continued.

He has already broken his earnings record from the whole of 2023 by July of 2024.

Scary.

But what about the 100th best golfer. And is the delta between 1 and 100 as big in golf as it is in Tennis?

Meet Harry Hall.

British Golfer. 25 years in his 4th full season of being a pro. At the time of writing this newsletter, he is ranked #100 in the world.

Guess how much money he made in 2023?

The answer is $1,564,348. Again, not bloody bad.

The crazy thing about golf is how variable your earnings are. This is the list of all the tournaments Henry played from May last year to the end of the season.

• Wells Fargo Championship - Missed Cut - $0

• AT&T Byron Nelson - T83 - $16,910

• Charles Schwab Challenge - T3 - $513,300

• RBC Canadian Open - T34 - $47,925

• Travelers Championship - T56 - $46,000

• Rocket Mortgage Classic - Missed Cut - $0

• Genesis Scottish Open - T60 - $23,220

• Barracuda Championship - Missed Cut - $0

• 3M Open - Missed Cut - $0

• Wyndham Championship -Missed Cut - $0

• Fortinet Championship - T45 - $23,964

• Sanderson Farms Championship - Missed Cut - $0

• Shriners Children's Open - T26 - $66,360

• Zozo Championship - T21 - $73,610

• World Wide Technology Championship - Missed Cut - $0

• Butterfield Bermuda Championship - Missed Cut - $0

As you can see, he missed the cut in more tournaments that he made money in!

Make no mistake about it. $1.5m is a crazy annual return for any job. But golf for those in the “middle of the pack” is so up-and-down.

The great thing is. Just last week Harry won his first PGA tournament at the John Deere classic making $720,000.

Shoutout to Harry Hall. I’m watching your career closely.

Finally, we have football.

• #1 Ranked Football Player: Erling Haaland

• 2023 Earnings: $45,000,000

With football it's often difficult to understand exactly how much players earn. With tennis and golf prize money and career earnings are clear and public. However with football everything is subjective, and often secretive.

Sportico reported that Haaland made $45m in 2023. That equates to:

• $3.75m a month

• $937,500 a week

😮‍💨

Interestingly, FourFourTwo magazine had Sergio Busquets as their 100th ranked player. The best defensive midfielder of my generation now plays at Inter Miami and that made my research a lot easier.

American football salaries are public so we can actually clearly see how much he makes.

Inter Miami signed Sergio as a designated player which allows them to pay him outside of the salary cap. He made $8.7m in 2023 and was one of the highest paid players in the USA.

There are two significant things about those eight million dollars.

The first is that is a little bit less than what he used to earn when playing in Europe!

The second being that there is no state tax in Florida which means he will take home significantly more than some of his other MLS counterparts playing in New York for example. Those regional differences being one of the more interesting things about American sports that you don't really get over here in Europe.

The interesting thing I found from this research is that the 100th best footballer in the world heavily outstrips the 100th best in Tennis and Golf.

You still make a lot of money as the 100th best Tennis player or Golfer but there's a variability to your earnings that can likely cause some discomfort for players who are out of form.

Shout out to Fabio, Shoutout to Harry too.

For those who want to see just how time-consuming travelling is for a tennis player, see this TikTok from Taylor Fritz’ girlfriend:

@moorrgs

an app that tracks all your flights 💅🏼 season 3 ✅ #tennistour

See you next week.