Ahhh they say “money makes the world go round” and then we also had ABBA singing about “Money, Money, Money” and more recently Jesse J. Price has tried to make us believe “It’s not About the Money, Money, Money”.
Certainly tennis players will have us believe it not about the money, money, money but about the … whatever else. Yeah right!
Well, let me tell you that six tennis players have made the latest Forbes list, the 2013 list, of the world’s richest athletes and tennis is behind only five other sports with the number of people in the top 100. Ahead of tennis are baseball with 27, basketball with 21, American football has 14 and football (soccer) has 13. After tennis comes golf but they had the No.1 spot with Tiger Woods on a total of $78.1 million.
Okay, so you want to know who the tennis players are, well here is the list and where they are ranked in the top 100, and it’s great that our sport has featured so highly. How perfect when a bank, BNP Paribas is the biggest sponsor in world tennis.
TOP 100 PLAYER TOTAL WINNINGS ENDORSEMENTS
RANK MILLIONS MILLIONS MILLIONS
2 ROGER FEDERER 71.5 6.5 65
22 MARIA SHARAPOVA 29 6 23
28 NOVAK DJOKOVIC 26.9 12.9 14
30 RAFAEL NADAL 26.4 5.4 21
68 SERENA WILLIAMS 20.5 8.5 12
85 LI NA 18.2 3.2 15
Now a breakdown of the nations in this list of 100, the USA is way ahead with 63, closest is England and Spain with four each, then Argentina and Venezuela with three each and then there is a whole list of nations with one or two athletes.
Well one thing I feel sure about is that none of the players will be trying to sue Forbes magazine like the Saudi prince who said Forbes got his wealth wrong. The publication said he was worth $20billion, the prince said it should have been $29billion.
It’s all about the cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.
