GLOBAL SPORTS SALARIES SURVEY 2017 AVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, TEAM-BY-TEAM, IN THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SPORTS LEAGUES 465 TEAMS 29 LEAGUES 16 COUNTRIES 9 sports 9,816 sportsmen (AND 2,428 sportswomen) $20.58 BILLION IN wages 1 AIM sportingintelligence sportingintelligence sportingintelligence INTRODUCTION Oklahoma is a mid-ranked with average on-court earnings First, a small illustration of the American state in size and of £7,150,388 per man for the general landscape. The green population, located in south current season, or $9,295,504. That graph on the left below charts the central USA and home to four doesn’t include endorsements or average earnings in the world’s million people. It’s famous for its sponsorship deals or bonuses. five best paid women’s sports Great Plains, extreme weather There’s more detail about The leagues. Now look on the right and museums dedicated to Thunder and how they claimed and the same five leagues are cowboy and Western heritage, this record later in this report, circled - alongside the five best and to Route 66. but the 2017 GSSS is a special paid men’s leagues in the world edition that takes another set of on the same scale. Well known Oklahomans include basketball players - from the best “The average pay across all actors Brad Pitt and Olivia Munn, women’s league in the world, the New York Yankees legend Mickey WNBA - and puts them centre NBA players in the current Mantle, Senator Elizabeth Warren, stage along with thousands of novelist Ralph Ellison, pioneering other sportswomen. season is £5,497,859.” astronaut Shannon Lucid and filmmaker Ron Howard. We have undertaken a global audit of how women’s And as of Autumn 2017, professional team sports compare Oklahoma is home to the best to men’s in wage terms. How paid sports team the world has many fully professional men’s ever known: the Oklahoma City leagues are there? Hundreds. Thunder of basketball’s NBA. How many women’s? Hardly any. This is the eighth edition of How many professional sportsmen Sportingintelligence’s Global are there in the world, who earn Sports Salaries Survey and a living wage at least from their The best paid women’s league uniquely we measure ‘first-team sport? Hundreds of thousands, at is the WNBA, and we have pay’ to assess the earnings of least. How many sportswomen? obtained the official salary athletes in widely different sports The honest answer is nobody figures for the 2017 season, when and leagues around the world. knows, but it’s one of the average pay was £57,507 for the In simple terms, we add up the questions we explore in these year (or $74,759). That is what the salaries of all the players on each pages and it’s a tiny fraction of bar on the far left of the women’s team and divide them by the the men’s figure. graph represents. That is the gold number of players to provide an standard in elite women’s team average figure per team. What is the difference between sport, worldwide. how much the men earn and Baseball is one sport that has how much the women earn? The best paid sports league in the had a team featured in the And does it matter? And if it world, by average salary, is the top spot, and football (soccer) does, then who is doing what to NBA, the men’s equivalent of the another, several times. Basketball change it? We hope to provide WNBA. The average pay across all hit No1 for the first time last year some answers, or at least robust NBA players in the current season when the Cleveland Cavaliers new figures to contribute to the is £5,497,859 (or $7,147,217). were the best paid in the world. debate. The men of the NBA earn 96 times But this year it’s ‘The Thunder’, as much as the women of the 2 3 sportingintelligence sportingintelligence WNBA, or £105,728 each week, Or in other words, 106 times as with a figure of 18 per cent in the “Space is no longer the final frontier. or roughly twice as much as an many men as women. USA, 11 per cent in the UK and WNBA player will earn in a year. Or to put it another way, 0.93 per nine per cent in Australia. Gender equality in sport is. Female cent of the world’s professional astronauts are almost 12 times more IN an attempt to gain some insight footballers are women. Some of these numbers remain a into the scale of professionalism distance from gender parity, but prevalent in their industry than in women’s sport against men’s, These numbers need caveats, wherever you look - in commerce, we looked to football, the truly heaps of them, and some of among the clergy, in outer professional female footballers.” global game. Every country plays those come below. Perhaps space - women make up a larger it. It is the national sport in many the biggest caveat is that if you share of the professionals than in countries. It is simple, accessible, include ‘semi-professional’ players football, and sport. cheap and immensely popular. for the men, namely those who The quadrennial football World earn a portion of their income As ‘many’ as 4.5 per cent of Cups are, by a long way, the but not much of it from football, directors at Nikkei 225 companies biggest single-sport events on the 137,021 will multiply. Whereas in Japan are women, in an the planet by almost whatever those 1,287 women already environment traditionally hostile to metric you choose, from global include a number of players them. At Australian ASX200 firms, audience to related revenue. who would more reasonably be 11 CEOs are women, or 5.5 per For all those reasons, football described as semi-professional. cent. At Fortune 500 companies should be ideal territory to Some women players do well in the USA, 6 per cent of CEOs measure equality, or rather financially, certainly. Many are women, and at FTSE 100 inequality, in numbers playing manage to get by. The salient companies in the UK, the figure is it, and making a living from it. point is the gender equality gap in 7 per cent. There should be no inherent football might be bigger than the barriers, theoretically, that prevent 106 to 1 headline suggests. women doing what their male This makes professional sport, with “4.5 per cent of counterparts do. football as a proxy for sport in this directors at Nikkei context, more gender unequal 225 companies in So how many male professional that many parts of society we players are there in the world? often consider to be male- Japan are women” And how many women? dominated, from politics to big It seems a simple question but business. None of which is laudable but it no one organisation can tell makes 1 per cent of professional you, accurately. Not the world We can demonstrate this using footballers look more pitiful still. governing body, FIFA, nor data from countries where sports regional bodies like UEFA. Not teams that feature in this report One in 10 churches in the USA has the international football players’ come from. In Sweden, 44 per a woman as the senior pastor, or union, FIFPro, nor even individual cent of members of parliament 10 per cent. Of the 299 people football associations in each are women, and it’s 42 per cent ordained to stipendiary ministry country, many of whom don’t in Mexico, 39 per cent in Spain, by the Church of England in 2016, compile such data. 37 per cent in Germany, 32 per 118 of them, or 39 per cent, were cent in the United Kingdom and women. Sporting Intelligence’s ‘audit’ Australia, 26 per cent in Canada, instead reviewed all the available 19 per cent in the USA (House of Even space is no longer the final sources, and added fresh Representatives) and nine per frontier: according to official research. Cutting to the chase, cent in Japan (ditto, as of the figures from NASA, 59 different our best estimates are there are: October 2017 Japanese election). women including cosmonauts, In global academia, 36 of the astronauts and payload specialists 137,021 male professional world’s top 200 universities are had flown in space by July 2017, footballers in the world. led by women (18 per cent). of 550 people altogether. That’s 1,287 female professional In medicine, 26 per cent of 11 per cent. footballers in the world. Canada’s surgeons are women, 4 5 sportingintelligence sportingintelligence first-team squads, and mainly in herein lies a problem. One WHAT is not in doubt is that sport is well established, often top divisions, in 90 countries and person’s view of ‘professional’ is male professional sportsmen, attracting big paying crowds logged almost 55,000 individual clearly different from another’s, especially but not only in team and more importantly huge TV professional male players. Our as is the interpretation even of sports, outnumber professional revenues. Sponsors flock in with audit drew on all those sources, the ‘professional’ definition. The sportswomen by a high factor, more money. This just doesn’t checked and updated them, report cites Turkey, for example, and demonstrably by about a 100 happen in most women’s added countries and leagues as having 316 professional to 1 in football. professional sport, especially team ‘missing’, spoke to local experts, women footballers, in a country sport.