In the last 15 years only two athletes have dominated the Forbes List of the highest earners in sports. Tiger Woods remained at the top of that monetary ranking twelve times, while boxer Floyd Mayweather topped the list three of the last four years.
Now, with Mayweather off his gloves and Woods still hobbling his game due to injuries, the top honorary spot in the ranking is occupied by Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, the world’s highest-paid athlete with estimated earnings of $88 million in the past 12 months, including salary, bonuses and advertising revenue. The Portuguese soccer player is the second highest paid team athlete after Michael Jordan ranked as the highest paid since Forbes began tracking athletes’ earnings in 1990.
The 100 highest-earning athletes come from 23 countries and compete in 10 sports, with Americans (65) and baseball players (26) the most numerous.
Lionel Messi is second in Forbes’ ranking of athletes ($81.4 million), basketball player Lebron James is third ($77.2 million) and 2017 Australian Open tennis champion Roger Federer is fourth, as well as the highest earning athlete in an individual sport, with $67.8 million in the last 12 months. The aforementioned are followed in earnings by basketball player Kevin Durant ($56.2 million), tennis player Novak Djokovic ($55.8 million) and American soccer player Cam Newton ($53.1 million).
Next up are the top two golfers: Phil Mickelson (52.9 million) and Jordan Spieth (52.8 million), with Kobe Bryant rounding out the top-10 (50 million).
Tennis players Serena William and Maria Sharapova are the only two women to appear in the top 100 of the Forbes ranking for the second consecutive year.
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