Breaking down Forbes' Top 100 highest earning athletes

Forbes is perhaps the highest profile business magazine in the world. It certainly boasts as much clout as any, and an effective part of this has simply been their willingness to create reams of lists: the Best Paid Actors, the most overperforming stocks for 1955.  The internet loves this stuff.  These aggregations are easy on the eye - and almost as easy on the brain.  But because it's easily digestible information, a interweb culture raised on instant gratification laps it up.

The following chart has its origins in one of Forbes' more popular lists.  It was released yesterday and estimates the net income for those highest earning athletes.  Typically, players in sports with broad appeal played by Average Joe do better in endorsements: those with the most lucrative sponsorship are usually golfers, tennis players, footballers and basketballers.  The best in motorsport earn as much or more in endorsements as they do in prize money or salary.  Players who form part of an extensive rotation - ie. baseballers and NFL players - can earn as little (!) as $100,000 for the year in endorsement deals.

The chart is broken down where an athlete's endorsement income is plotted against his earnings from salary or prize money.  Minimum qualifying income for 2011-12 was $16.6 million (US) for the year.  Athletes are coloured according to their sport.  As always, we recommend clicking on the chart to enlarge it.

Copyright Balanced Sports

The list is relatively easily broken down.  The two highest earners were both boxers who pulled in relatively minimal endorsement deals - considering the world's most highly paid athlete was Floyd Mayweather, who is currently serving a prison sentence for threatening his ex.  You can see the obvious trends - those most marketable NFL/MLB stars earn up to eight figures in endorsements (Peyton Manning and Derek Jeter respectively), but generally the highest paid players in those sports earn comparative peanuts by selling their name.

The list comprised four boxers, one sprinter (Usain Bolt), five golfers, eight motorsport aces (4x NASCAR, 3x Formula 1 and Valentino Rossi), five tennis players, ten footballers, 13 basketballers, 30 NFL players, 22 baseballers and two Indian cricketers.  It almost goes without saying that the three outliers - top red, and far-right greens - were Tiger Woods, Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.

Only two women made the list, tennis players Maria Sharapova and Li Na, who came in at 26th and 81st on the list, respectively.  Both only earned a small fraction of their total endorsement value in prize money, making them typical for their sport.

Kim Jong-Il's golf record under threat

As reported on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's morning current affairs program AM, North Korea has become so short of cash that they've begun hocking tourist packages at $1000 apiece to play the North Korean Amateur Golf Open.

There the punters can try and better North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, who according to popular local legend holds the course - and world - record, having completed the eighteen holes in a flabbergasting 38-under. His round, apocryphally taking place at the course's opening twenty years ago, included an even-more-poleaxing 11 holes-in-one. That round's total betters the previous record by Norman Manley, who's best year was 1979 where he aced four holes. Texan Mancil Davis allegedly holds the PGA World Record for aces with 51 career-spanning one-shot holes; so for the cartoon supervillain featured in Team America: World Police to smash eleven in one round is obviously a fabrication but such a fun one that you can't help finding it endearing, rather than another example of a corrupt and vicious regime. The shell-suited one is the subject of stories the North Korean equivalent of "Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door". That the dictator's dauphin, Kim Jong-Un, almost a carbon copy of the Dear Leader, is immortalized in state-produced pop songs as the perfect man yet more proof of the gun-induced nationalistic fervour of North Korea.

The -38 Kim Jong-Il recorded - 34 off the stick - is another world record. By 21 strokes. Apparently a score of 55 is "commonplace", but no-one's ever verified a 54 but surely plenty of shysters have claimed they've managed it.

North Korea's sporting seclusion has ended with a bang in the last eighteen months as they competed in the 2010 FIFA World Cup with a respectable performance against sumo-weights Brazil but being dismantled completely by Portugal. Nonetheless, the talents of some of their players raised eyebrows. Now they are inviting the outside world inside the iron venetians to profiteer from them as the last of their money disappears. The last players to play the course were South Koreans, one of whom was shot dead when she strayed into a forbidden area.

You couldn't make it up.

PS. Click here for more Kim Jong-Il facts.