Americans dominate Sportico’s annual look at the world’s 100 highest-paid athletes, nabbing 62 entries thanks to sky-high salaries in the NBA and NFL. Yet, the very top of the athlete financial table is a global affair with 12 different countries represented by the 15 best-paid sports stars. LeBron James the only American in the top five.
Portuguese soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo leads the way for the third straight year, with an estimated $260 million in 2025 earnings, including $200 million from his Saudi Pro League club Al Nassr and $60 million off the field. (Here’s the complete top 100 list and methodology.)
Ronaldo has earned at least $100 million for nine straight years, and 2025 is the third straight at $200 million-plus. He continues to be a popular pitchman with more than 10 brand partnerships, including Nike, Herbalife, Binance, Perplexity, Yili and Therabody. His sponsors benefit from his status as the world’s most followed person on social media—his follower count eclipsed 1 billion in 2024.
Overall, the top 100 earned $6.05 billion total, down 2.1% from last year’s record tally of the 100 richest active athletes. Women were shut out from the top 100 for the third straight year. The cutoff was New York Knicks forward OG Anunoby at $37.9 million; last year’s cutoff was $37.5 million. Tennis’ Coco Gauff was the highest-paid female athlete in 2025 at $33 million, by Sportico’s count.
Team salaries continue to rise in the world’s biggest sports leagues, but the slight overall drop is a function of several factors. Boxers Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk earned a combined $260 million in 2024 for a pair of fights in Saudi Arabia, but both missed the cut this year. Fury “retired” before he predictably announced a return to the ring for 2026, while Usyk had only one fight this year—a July bout against Daniel DuBois that netted him a payday well below our cutoff.
Neymar ranked in the top six in the previous four iterations of Sportico’s highest-paid athletes list and has made more than $1 billion in salary and endorsements throughout his pro career. But the Brazilian’s annual earnings fell nearly $50 million in 2025 when he left Saudi club Al Hilal for his boyhood team Santos, and he now ranks No. 30 with earnings of $60 million.
Saudi Arabia didn’t land any new high-priced talent in 2025 for its soccer league or PIF-backed LIV Golf tour, but the country is still spending major dollars in sports. In June, Ronaldo re-signed with Al Nassr for another two years after the 40-year-old teased the end of his Saudi tenure on social media.
In February, Canelo Alvarez signed a four-fight deal with Turki Alalshikh, the head of Riyadh Season and chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. A longtime boxing insider told Sportico the fight contract was in the neighborhood of $325 million. In May, Canelo beat William Scull in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, but four months later, he lost by unanimous decision to Terence Crawford (No. 21, $66 million) in Las Vegas — Turki also signed a deal with boxer Naoya Inoue (No. 25, $62 million). Alvarez ranked second overall behind Ronaldo at $137 million, including endorsements.
NBA players represent 40% of the top 100, led by James at $128.7 million, including $80 million off the court. With endorsements, James has been the NBA’s highest-paid player in 12 of the past 13 seasons, with Stephen Curry the only one to break the streak during the 2024-25 season after the Golden State Warriors point guard got a one-time boost from his Under Armour contract extension. Before Curry, Kobe Bryant in 2012-13 was the last player to finish ahead of LeBron.
Curry has the top playing salary for the ninth straight year at $59.6 million for the 2025-26 season. James has had the top NBA salary only once (2016-17) during his 23-year career, but his off-court earnings have exceeded his team salary every year since he was drafted first overall in 2003 by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Nike remains his biggest backer under a deal worth more than $30 million per year. New brand partners last year included watch company Richard Mille and Barbie-maker Mattel; in April, he became the first pro athlete to have a Ken doll. Amazon also signed a multiyear deal for James’ digital series, Mind the Game, to distribute it across several Amazon properties.
The top 100 would have included even more NBA players, except their 2024-25 salaries were dinged by the league’s escrow system, which is used to ensure the proper revenue split as laid out in the collective bargaining agreement between players and the league. The NBA withholds 10% of player salaries to ensure the revenue split, but overall revenue came in light, largely due to the choppy local media environment.
The result was 91% of the escrow or roughly $480 million went back to teams and 9% was returned to players; Curry had to forego an NBA-high $5.1 million. Our NBA salary figures are a blend of the past two seasons, covering the 2025 calendar year. NBA players should be clear to collect their full 2025-26 salaries now that the new $76 billion national TV deal has kicked off.
The NFL ranked second after the NBA with 22 athletes in the top 100. Patrick Mahomes (No. 17, $80.3 million) led the way, a tick ahead of fellow quarterbacks Josh Allen (No. 19, $73.2 million) and Justin Herbert (No. 20, $71.1 million).
Mahomes has more than a dozen endorsement partners, including Adidas, Coors Light, Invisalign, Oakley, State Farm and T-Mobile, and he added Panini and Hublot to his portfolio last year. Mahomes makes an estimated $30 million off the field, second in the NFL behind his teammate Travis Kelce at $32 million.
Soccer landed 13 players in the top 100 and a sport-high five among the 20 highest-paid athletes. In addition to Ronaldo, Karim Benzema (No. 6, $115 million), Riyad Mahrez (No. 45, $53.5 million) and Sadio Mané (No. 52, $51 million) are part of the Saudi Pro League, matching LaLiga for the number of slots in the top 100.
Baseball had nine players in the top 100, including two who earned more than $100 million—the previous MLB high-water mark was $72 million. Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani were the top earners in their sport by a wide margin, but their path to nine-figures came in very different ways.
Soto’s $129.2 million haul was 95% derived from his playing contract, including an MLB-record $75 million signing bonus as part of the 15-year, $765 million free-agent deal he signed with the New York Mets in December 2024.
Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers is all deferred outside of $2 million per year, but the Japanese superstar earned an estimated $100 million from sponsors and memorabilia during the 2025 season, when he won his fourth MVP. He also pocketed a $485,000 postseason bonus for the Dodgers’ second straight World Series title.
Going into the 2025 season, Ohtani added a half-dozen companies to his endorsement portfolio after his first season with the Dodgers in 2024 elevated his global standing even further. Ohtani’s $100 million in endorsement earnings in a single year is a threshold reached by only three athletes ever: Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Curry, who each did it one time.
Only Woods had a more sponsor-dependent 2025 than Ohtani among the top 100, as his $54.4 million in earnings included just $438,000 in prize money from his TGL play—injuries kept him from teeing it up at any PGA events. Six other athletes made more from sponsors than salary or prize money. Los Angeles Chargers tackle Rashawn Slater (No. 94, $38.1 million) was the extreme the other way, with 99.9% of his earnings coming from his playing salary and bonus. MLBers Jacob deGrom, Anthony Rendon and Zack Wheeler also made more than 99% of their income from their playing salary.
The number of Formula 1 drivers who earned $38 million doubled from two to four, as McLaren’s two drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, joined Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen. The McLaren duo cashed in with bonuses from a combined 14 race wins; Norris was the first McLaren driver to win the Formula 1 driver championship in 17 years, while Piastri finished third.
Hamilton’s first year at Ferrari did not go as planned, as he didn’t make a single race podium and finished sixth in the driver standings. The poor on-track performance kept him from adding bonuses to his $70 million salary, but he remains the race circuit’s biggest star, which is reflected in his $30 million off-track earnings. He is the first F1 driver to earn $100 million in nominal dollars in a single year—on an inflation-adjusted basis, Michael Schumacher reached nine figures during his peak in the early 2000s.
Hamilton’s brand partners include Lululemon, Perplexity, Dior, EA, Rimowa, CFI and Fanatics/Topps. In 2023, he launched a nonalcoholic agave brand, Almave, with Mexican spirits firm Casa Lumbre, and French drinks giant Pernod invested in 2024. Hamilton was a producer of Apple’s F1: The Movie, which has made $632 million at the box office since its June launch.
Athletes from eight sports and 28 countries made the cut. Salaries, bonuses and prize money represented $4.63 billion of the total, while endorsements and other sources of earnings were an additional $1.42 billion. Twenty-six athletes are new this year, led by Soto at No. 4. The Los Angeles Clippers, Philadelphia 76ers and Real Madrid each landed three players on the top 100, while a total of 12 athletes from Los Angeles-based teams qualified, twice as many as those on New York clubs.
Woods, who turned 50 on Dec. 30, is the oldest on the list, exactly nine years older than fellow Capricorn James, who is second-oldest, a week older than Hamilton. Nine athletes under 25 are ranked with Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham nearly two months younger than tennis ace and fellow 22-year-old Carlos Alcaraz.