http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=6391145 I thought this article might be interesting for comparative purposes. There are, of course, a lot of soccer players on the list. And I also find it interesting that, for example, Dirk Nowitzki is the highest paid German.
Also interesting--the highest-paid Brazilian isn't a soccer player; it's Formula 1 racer Felipe Massa. EDIT: Holy cow, the highest-paid English athlete is also Formula 1, and the highest-paid Italian is a motorcycle racer. Also, the lowest-paid players on the list all seem to be soccer players.
Fascinating list. Emmanuel Adebayor's annual pay equals the GDP of a sizable Togolese city. Of course, you have to take a list like this with plenty of salt grains. They say they couldn't find any Afghan professional athletes. They obviously didn't read the recent Wall Street Journal story about the guy who bought a Lexus with his wages from that sport where they use a dead goat as the ball. Here's the count by sport: Soccer 114 (13 in Manchester alone) Basketball 18 Baseball 12 Auto racing 6 Football 5 Golf 5 Hockey 5 Cricket 4 Boxing 3 Track 3 Tennis 2 (Switzerland, Tahiti) Badminton 1 (Malaysia) Motorcycle racing 1 (Italy) Bicycle racine 1 (Luxembourg) Rugby league 1 (PNG) Rugby union 1 (Cook Islands) Sumo 1 (Mongolia) Yachting 1 (NZ)
The figures for Cricket appear to be incorrect. They only include wages from the IPL, which is a 2-month long league. It doesn't include wages from national team contracts, which forms the bulk of the Cricket calender.
I'm not sure there are any sizable Togolese cities outside of the capital Lome. Though Adebayor's salary is by far the highest on the list as a multiple of his country's per capita income. I think Benjani (Zimbabwe) was second.
No surprise there. A soccer club needs a squad of about 25-30 players, and the biggest clubs have at least about a dozen highly payed stars. Basketball just needs to pay half that many players, motorsports teams only need to pay 1 or 2 star drivers.
I could be wrong, but my understanding was that the IPL came along and kind of blew the cricket world away with its high salaries. The other thing to mention is that technically this is a "base salary" list, while national team earnings are all technically bonuses (because you have to make the NT first).
That might be true in soccer, which is primarily a club sport, and internationals are add-ons. In cricket, the international calender is the primary calender, with test matches and one-day internationals. Twenty20 leagues like the IPL are domestic tournaments, which are more ad-hoc. A cricketer's primary earnings are from the centralized contracts from the national team.
Marama Vahirua is Tahitian and played for AS Nancy this past season. I can't imagine that he doesn't top $19,500.
Most of the NFL ones are very low also, because the guaranteed pay(base pay) is very low compared to their non guaranteed play depending on playing time and performance.
I literally just saw that as well, Yes, he is an American. Also, he and Becamex Bình Dương FC mutually agreed to terminate Lee's contract so now he's a free agent.
