Floyd Money Mayweather lived up to the hype of his own nickname topping the latest edition of Forbes list of the Worlds 100 Highest-Paid Athletes.
The magazine released the details of the their annual money list on Wednesday (10 June) with the Las Vegas boxer earning $300m (£194m) last year (June to June) almost doubling the number two on the list – his defeated opponent Manny Pacquiao.
I think its pretty safe bet as soon as Pacquiao and Mayweather agreed to fight that Floyd Mayweather would be the highest paid athlete in the world this year. Its the third time in four years hes been on top of the list, but the money is just staggering, explained Kurt Badenhausen, senior editor at Forbes in charge of compiling the list.
Nothing is on this scale. Nothing is even close. The biggest event every year in sports is the Super Bowl. Last year, though, the Super Bowl generated $500m in revenue from tickets and TV and concessions and all that stuff. Pacquiao-Mayweather did $600m and its a 36-minute event. Theres nothing ever like this in the history of sports.
For their payday Mayweather and Pacquiao joined golfer Tigers Woods as the only athletes to earn nine figures in a single year. The purse for their megabout fueled much of the $460m earnings increase on the list.
The worlds highest paid athletes are making more than ever. The top-100 earned $3.2bn over the last 12 months – thats up 17% from the prior year, said Badenhausen.
The worlds former number one golfer, who topped the list for almost a decade, has slumped since his heyday in 2008, but Woods still sits in the top ten with a $50.6m last year. However, only $600,000 came from golf winnings and for the first time ever Phil Mickelson topped him by one spot on the list.
The list of the worlds 100 highest-paid athletes consists of players from ten different sports. Half of the list come from the American major leagues with baseball players leading the way with 27 names on the list. The NBA has 18 players with LeBron James in 6th spot with $64.8m and newcomer James Harden in the 100th spot at $18.8m. The NFL has 16 football players on the list while the global form of the game has 15 names led by Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi behind boxers Mayweather and Pacquiao in the third and fourth spots.
I think one interesting component of the list is you got a lot of baseball players, you got a lot of NFL players, but theyre not necessarily the people up at the top. So, of the top-100 you have 62 Americans, but you look at the top-25 alone, its much more diverse. Its a much more international list. Fourteen of the top-25 are non-Americans. You have a bunch of soccer players. You have people playing global sports like tennis, like golf, and I think thats one of the more interesting things that comes out of putting together a list like this, concluded Badenhausen.
Cricket and track and field both placed one athlete on the list. Other sports include tennis with seven players, golf with six, six racing drivers and three boxers. There are no hockey players on the list for a fourth straight year. The cutoff for the top 100 continues to rise and is now $18.8m, up from $17.3m last year and $16.4m in 2013.
The only two women on the list were Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. The two tennis stars were in the 26th and 47th spots, respectively.
