Prescott, Messi, Ohtani and more: How the world’s biggest sports stars get paid
admin_news
After all, they command the most eyeballs, generate more attention than their team-mates, and tend to be the focal point of the club or franchise they represent.
It is why Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest soccer player of all time, can command a rather complicated annual salary of about $70million to $80m at Inter Miami, even though the 38-year-old is in the twilight of his career and retirement is on the horizon.
The same can be said for Cristiano Ronaldo — who some will argue is an even better footballer than Messi — at Saudi Arabia’s Al Nassr, where he makes $225million a year, making him the highest-paid athlete in the world. It helps that Al Nassr are majority owned by Saudi Arabia’s state Public Investment Fund (PIF), one of the largest sovereign wealth funds globally, which allows them to fund the 41-year-old Portuguese forward’s exorbitant salary.
Salaries running into the tens of millions are not exclusive to soccer, though. American sports, whether it is the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL or WNBA, also fork out for the biggest stars, while Formula 1 drivers and boxers at the top of their sport can command sizable pay cheques.
Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys’ starting quarterback, became the NFL’s highest-paid player in history when he signed a $240million, four-year contract extension in September 2024, which saw his salary rocket to $60m a year, with $231m of his overall contract guaranteed. As explained later, that was a pretty incredible deal for Prescott because, while one of the better quarterbacks in the NFL, few would consider him to be at the very top of the list.
Three months after the Prescott deal, Juan Soto agreed to the biggest-ever contract in MLB, signing a 15-year deal worth a staggering $765m with the New York Mets, surpassing Shohei Ohtani’s $700m deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers announced in late 2023. But there are intricacies to those arrangements, particularly in the case of Ohtani, that make them far from a straightforward paycheque.
To capture just how much contracts can be worth and how exactly the biggest names get paid (excluding off-field endorsements), The Athletic’s reporters across different sports put their heads together…
Soccer
The two biggest names in soccer for a generation have been Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. They have dominated the Ballon d’Or (the award given to the best player in the world over the previous year) — Messi has won it a record eight times, Ronaldo five, and they’ve been runner-up on a combined 11 occasions, often to each other — and when there are conversations about the greats of the game, they almost always involve them.
Their worth, however, extends far beyond what they can do for a club or national team on the pitch. They are global brands in their own right, and that is why, even in the latter stages of their respective careers, they are still able to command the two biggest salaries.
To entice Messi to Inter Miami from Europe, they made the Argentina forward MLS’s highest-paid player, offered him equity in the club he would join and a slice of the revenue from the league’s broadcast deal with Apple.
The 2022 World Cup winner has 511 million followers on Instagram, second only to Ronaldo’s 672m. The fact they are the two most followed individuals on the platform, not just athletes, tells you so much about why they are so valuable to the clubs they play for.
A single post, be it Messi uploading several pictures of him playing for Miami or Ronaldo doing the same for Al Nassr, can turn the dial and earn their respective sides swathes of followers, which they are able to then monetise themselves.
Ronaldo is arguably worth more to the country of Saudi Arabia than he is to its Saudi Pro League because of the prestige and fame he brings, with plenty of critics saying his salary is evidence of the Gulf nation sportswashing its reputation.
In women’s soccer, Trinity Rodman, the USWNT and Washington Spirit superstar, signed a new deal in January worth in excess of $2million a year, according to her agent, Mike Senkowski of Upper 90 Sports Group. Last month, Cat Macario signed a five-year deal with San Diego Wave worth $8m, making it the richest contract in women’s soccer history. However, a source with knowledge of women’s Ballon d’Or holder Aitana Bonmati’s contract figures said the midfielder’s four-year deal with Spanish team Barcelona is worth more.
On top of what they are all paid by their clubs, they also have their own portfolio of global endorsements.
Messi, for example, has a lifetime deal with Adidas that will comfortably run into hundreds of millions of dollars, while Ronaldo signed a lifetime deal with Nike in 2016. Rodman, too, has plenty of brand deals, including Adidas, Oakley and Red Bull, so will also see her annual income boosted.
Dan Sheldon
National Football League
All NFL teams must operate under a league-mandated salary cap. The cap changes annually based on league revenue; as the NFL continues to grow — particularly in terms of broadcast rights — it increases. This year, the cap is above $300 million for the first time, and it has only decreased once since it was established in 1994. That was in 2021, when league revenues decreased as a result of the pandemic.
The NFL announces the cap ahead of the new league year, which begins in March. It is a “hard cap” — when a new league year begins, all teams must then be compliant through the next 12 months. If any one is not, it is subject to penalties such as fines and loss of picks in the annual college draft.
All money paid from a club to a player must hit the cap at some point. There are different accounting machinations used to move money around and manipulate space. The cap is a decisive factor in how teams spend, strategize, build rosters and structure contracts.
Money committed to players can be guaranteed in three ways: for skill, for cap and for injury. These guarantees determine what money a player is entitled to if his contract is terminated. When money is guaranteed for skill, he is entitled to that money if a club ends the deal because his performance has been unsatisfactory. When money is guaranteed for cap, the player is entitled to that money if the team rips up the agreement to create cap space. When money is guaranteed for injury, he is entitled to that money if his contract is scrapped as a result of a physical issue sustained while performing contractual services. Money can be guaranteed for all (fully guaranteed), one or two (partially guaranteed), or none (non-guaranteed) of these purposes.
Most NFL contracts also include a signing bonus, which is a fully guaranteed lump sum due to the player when they sign the contract. For salary cap accounting purposes, this lump sum can be prorated (divided evenly) over the length of the contract to spread out the amount that counts against the cap. A signing bonus can be prorated for up to five seasons. (As an example, let’s say Player X agrees a four-year contract today, with a $20 million signing bonus. That bonus would count for $5 million against the cap in each of 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029. Signing bonuses allow players to collect more money up front while teams get more flexibility in how they account for it.)
How much a player makes on his contract is largely contingent on what position he plays. Quarterback is the most important position in football. As such, they make the most money. The top 10 current contracts in terms of average per year (APY) all belong to men who play that position. No non-quarterback in the league makes more than $47 million per year, but there are 10 quarterbacks who average more than $50 million.
Dak Prescott is the highest-paid player in football at $60 million APY. Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, Jordan Love and Trevor Lawrence are tied for second at $55 million per year.
While quarterbacks are the highest-paid players, those who most directly impact quarterbacks are the next highest-paid. Edge-rusher Micah Parsons, whose job is to tackle the passer before he can throw the ball, is the highest-paid non-quarterback at $46.5 million APY. Of the top 30 players in APY, 16 are quarterbacks, seven are edge rushers, and the other seven are wide receivers, whose primary role is to catch quarterbacks’ passes.
Prescott is an interesting case, because he is a very good player but certainly not the best quarterback in the NFL. Leverage often comes into play in certain negotiations, and that was the case with him. Entering the 2024 season, Prescott was on the final year of his contract in Dallas, counting at close to $60 million against the cap. He was set to hit free agency when the new league year began in 2025, meaning all teams would have a chance to sign him. If the Cowboys let Prescott leave in free agency, they would be faced with the daunting task of finding a replacement. Quarterbacks get paid a lot because good ones are very hard to find.
Dallas had to extend Prescott’s contract to keep him for 2025 and beyond. Prescott held all the leverage, and he made out with a record deal just before the start of the 2024 regular season. The Cowboys only had themselves to blame because they waited until the last possible moment to extend. Smart teams extend players earlier in the process to avoid these leveraged negotiating positions.
Unlike the case of Messi in MLS, the NFL forbids teams from offering equity to players as a component of compensation.
Daniel Popper
Major League Baseball
Thanks to its lack of a salary cap, the ceiling on MLB salaries is unlimited, and the bar has been raised significantly in the past three years.
That started with the free agency of Shohei Ohtani, a two-way superstar unlike anything the sport had seen in a century. When initially reported, Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers was a remember-where-you-were moment; it was nearly double the largest free-agent contract ever signed to that point. However, Ohtani’s deal contained massive deferrals: He would be paid only $2 million of his $70 million annual salary, with the rest coming his way a decade later.
The deferrals can help both sides. It lowered the amount Ohtani counted toward the sport’s luxury tax, giving the Dodgers some added flexibility to add players around him. In MLB, a team whose annual payroll exceeds a certain number (in 2026, that’s $244 million) is subject to a tax on every dollar they spend over it. The percentage of that surcharge depends on how many consecutive years they have been over that threshold and how much money they exceed it by. The Dodgers currently pay a 110 percent surcharge on every dollar spent over the luxury tax threshold.
Many players also opt for deferrals and large signing bonuses (as opposed to a higher salary) to avoid paying income tax in certain states. In Ohtani’s case, the deferrals brought the present-day value of his contract down to roughly $461 million.
One winter later, another generational star hit the open market in Juan Soto.
Soto entered free agency not only as one of the sport’s most accomplished hitters over the previous six years, but also at an unusually young age. Since teams control players for at least their first six major-league seasons, most players don’t become free agents until they’re about to turn 29 or 30. Soto was a free agent ahead of his age-26 season.
His 15-year, $765 million deal with the New York Mets easily eclipsed Ohtani’s with the Dodgers, regardless of how you considered the latter’s deferred money. (Soto’s deal did not contain any deferrals.)
It felt like Soto’s $51 million annual average value — while players’ salaries sometimes vacillate over the life of a contract, the AAV is just the total money divided by the years of the deal after accounting for deferrals — would stand for at least a few years. But just this past winter, his fellow outfielder Kyle Tucker topped it in a deal with the Dodgers. Tucker turned down a longer-term offer to join the Toronto Blue Jays as a free agent from the Chicago Cubs to sign a four-year, $240 million contract in LA, with a comparatively minor $30 million deferred (but a $64 million signing bonus).
Since the start of this decade, the highest average annual value in the sport has ballooned from $36 million to Tucker’s $57.1 million — a growth of more than 58 per cent.
Similar to the NFL, MLB forbids teams from offering equity to players as a component of compensation.
Tim Britton
National Basketball Association
The NBA doesn’t allow for massively deferred salaries like MLB or for players to receive ownership equity as in MLS. And, while there technically is not a hard salary cap, the 2023 collective bargaining agreement in effect limits how much an NBA team can spend on salaries in a given season.
NBA owners and players split all league revenue roughly 50/50. The league has a salary cap, which almost every team is over, and two subsequent salary “aprons” that impose increasingly draconian restrictions as clubs spend more and more money. Factor in a tax multiplier for those who repeatedly spend past the salary cap, and payroll expenses can include hundreds of millions in taxes.
The NBA also specifies how much money teams can spend on specific players, totals that increase based on an individual’s service time and/or honors earned. Exact figures are tricky, as salaries are percentages of a salary cap that grows each year, but superstars with 10 or more seasons in the NBA can make up to 35 percent of the salary cap (set at $154.6 million for the 2025-26 season).
The highest earner this season is the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry, who is projected to make more than $59.6 million (and then more than $62 million in 2026-27), followed by the Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic and Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid at $55.2 million each.
The league’s reigning most valuable player Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Phoenix Suns’ Devin Booker signed massive contract extensions and lead the NBA in average annual value with $68.3 million and $66.6 million, respectively.
The largest contracts (in terms of total value) were signed by two Boston Celtics players, according to Spotrac: Jayson Tatum signed a 5-year deal worth a projected $313.9 million that began last year, while teammate Jaylen Brown inked a 5-year, $285.4 million projected contract that started in 2024.
As with the NFL, the NBA’s salary cap is expected to grow in upcoming years, commensurate with its recently signed larger TV deals increasing league revenues. Given that the top players’ wages are linked to the cap total, this means the maximum salaries are expected to expand dramatically in years to come for young superstars including Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs or the Dallas Mavericks’ Cooper Flagg.
Caleb Slinkard and Mike Vorkunov
Women’s National Basketball Association
The WNBA is another league that has a hard salary cap, thus limiting the amount any individual player can earn, and there are no exceptions to exceed the cap. Even after a new collective bargaining agreement goes into effect when the 2026 season starts next month, which will increase salaries sixfold, WNBA players remain among the lowest-paid professional athletes.
Part of the reason is the league’s revenue-sharing system. Unlike the NBA, which has a 50/50 Basketball Related Income split that results in players taking home 40 per cent of the league’s gross revenue, their female counterparts have only just negotiated a CBA that will give them 20 per cent of the WNBA’s revenue.
The WNBA is hamstrung by a structure in which the league’s team owners only control 42 percent of the league. Another 42 percent is in the hands of NBA team owners and the remaining 16 percent is held by investors following a 2022 capital raise.
Nevertheless, the WNBA will cross an important milestone in 2026 with the first seven-figure salaries for an individual player.
Free agency for the coming season hasn’t yet taken place, but A’ja Wilson confirmed in recent days that she will be returning to the Las Vegas Aces for 2026. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in March that this would be on a supermax contract worth $1.4 million, after making $200,000 in 2025. That is a massive jump from the salary of $249,244 that Kelsey Mitchell of the Indiana Fever earned in 2025 as the league’s highest-paid player.
The young stars of the league are still waiting to cash in on their big paydays. Indiana’s Caitlin Clark will earn $528,846 in what is her third pro season, lower than the WNBA’s 2026 average salary, while Paige Bueckers of the Dallas Wings will make $500,000 in her second year in the league.
Sabreena Merchant
National Hockey League
The salaries for top NHL players lag behind their big-four North American counterparts for a few reasons. The league brings in less revenue, for one, and its CBA also dictates that no player can sign a contract for an AAV greater than 20 percent of the salary cap — proportionally lower, by 15 percent, than the NBA supermax.
Even then, we’ve never seen a player come all that close to the ceiling. The top-paid player in any given season tends to hover around the 16 to 17 percent mark, including Kirill Kaprizov of the Minnesota Wild, who signed a record-breaking eight-year, $136 million deal that kicks in for the start of the 2026-27 season in October, when the cap will rise to an all-time high of $104 million after years’ worth of Covid 19 pandemic-related stagnation.
What makes Kaprizov’s contract most interesting, though, is that, as with Dak Prescott in the NFL, while he’s an elite player, he is not one of the two or three best in the world.
Since the advent of the NHL salary cap in 2005, there’s always been something of an artificial limit on player salaries relative to their standing, league-wide. The logic, flawed or not, goes: “OK, Player X is good, but does he deserve to make more than (Washington Capitals star) Alex Ovechkin?” In 2011, say, that answer tended to be “nope,” and things would fall in line accordingly. Kaprizov’s contract signals, at least in some instances, that logic may no longer apply.
For the immediate future, most of the league’s superstars are locked up on long- or medium-term deals. The big asterisk, though, is Connor McDavid. He is the best in the world, and he’s got two seasons remaining on a short-term, wildly team-friendly extension $12.5 million AAV he signed with the Edmonton Oilers last summer.
McDavid’s next deal, wherever and whenever he signs it, will likely be the biggest in the history of the sport.
Sean Gentille
Golf
In golf, your results determine your payday.
Nobody represents that more than current world No. 1, Scottie Scheffler, who won nine tournaments in 2024 and another six in 2025 (including two of the four Major championships).
American Scheffler earned just under $30 million in both of those seasons, with $29.2 million in 2024 and $27.6 million in 2025. But that’s not just about wins. Scheffler is so consistent that he also had 13 top-5 finishes last year, and never finished worse than 20th all season. So, for example, fourth place at the Masters still earned him more than $1 million, and his season-worst 20th place netted him $240,250.
Meanwhile, the Saudi-funded LIV Golf has been where golfers can go to make bank, largely in the form of signing bonuses and other guaranteed payments as incentives to drop out of the PGA Tour to play in a competitor league.
Two-time Major winner Jon Rahm didn’t win a single tournament in 2025, but took home $33,429,211 total. How? Well, he earned $13.6 million by finishing T11 or better in all 13 LIV regular-season starts. And that consistency meant he banked another $18 million from topping the LIV individual season standings. He also earned a further $1.6 million combined in the four Major championships.
None of this even includes Rahm’s reported $300million to $400m signing bonus for joining LIV from the PGA Tour in the first place in December 2023.
The 31-year-old Spaniard has earned just under $500 million in his career now, before endorsements. Compare that to Scheffler, who surpassed $100 million last year.
But enough of the men, what about women’s golf?
Jeeno Thitikul has emerged as the best player on the LPGA in recent years. While the 23-year-old Thai star has yet to win a Major, she finished top 10 in 14 of 20 starts in 2025 and won three times, including the Tour Championship. That was enough success to make $7.6 million, nearly double the second-highest earner, Minjee Lee of Australia ($3.9 million).
For reference, the game’s biggest star, Nelly Korda from the U.S., had a down year by her standards but earned $2.7 million.
Brody Miller
Tennis
Endorsements and, in some cases, exhibition matches, are often what push top tennis players’ yearly earnings into eye-popping territory. Otherwise, the math is simple: The more they win — and the longer they win for — the more they earn.
It’s no surprise then that Serena Williams of the United States is the all-time prize money leader in women’s tennis, having earned $94.8 million in a career with 73 titles, including 23 Grand Slam singles trophies.
That’s roughly double what the women who occupy the second and third spots on that list have made.
World No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka of Belarus is the top-earning active woman; she’s hauled in $49 million by winning 24 career singles titles, including four Grand Slam events. Poland’s Iga Świątek follows her with $44.9 million from 25 singles titles, including six Grand Slams.
That gap is even wider in the men’s game.
Novak Djokovic of Serbia has won the most career prize money in ATP tour history, with $193.2 million, thanks in large part to his 101 singles titles, 24 of which came at the four Grand Slams. Spain’s Rafael Nadal checks in at No. 2 with $134.9 million career on-court earnings from 92 singles titles and 22 Grand Slams, and Roger Federer of Switzerland just trails with $130.6 million in on-court earnings from 103 titles, including 20 Grand Slams.
The current best two men’s players in the world have a ways to go before they catch the Big Three. World No. 1 Carlos Alcaraz is fifth on the ATP’s career-prize earnings list (No. 4? Andy Murray from Scotland, of course). The 22-year-old Spaniard has made $64.3 million in winning 26 singles titles, including seven Grand Slams.
World No. 2 Jannik Sinner recently became the eighth tennis player to cross the $60 million threshold, thanks to his win at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., often considered the biggest event of the year other than the Grand Slams. The Italian has 26 titles to his name, including four Grand Slams, and checks in at No. 7 on the all-time list, just behind Germany’s Alexander Zverev.
Tennis is much more top-heavy than team sports when it comes to on-court earnings. There is a steep drop-off from around the top 150; for players in that region, life on tour can be a matter of just breaking even.
Alcaraz has made $3.7 million on court this year. For world No. 167 Alex Barrena of Argentina, that number is $63,164 — not much wiggle room after covering expenses that include international flights, hotels, food and coaching fees.
Ava Wallace
Boxing
A fighter’s earnings depend largely on how much they are deemed to be worth, as opposed to how often they are in the ring or even whether or not they win (although this can obviously have an impact on their worth).
Take Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez, for example.
Last February, the Mexican super middleweight signed a four-fight deal with Riyadh Season that was widely reported to be worth $400 million. This sum includes pay-per-view shares, merchandising and other additional contractual earnings.
He won the first of those contests, against Germany-based Cuban William Scull in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last May (a points victory that set a new record low for punches thrown in a 12-round bout, as tracked by CompuBox, with just 445), but lost the only other one to happen so far; a September megafight with former undisputed welterweight and undisputed light welterweight champion Terence Crawford of the U.S. in Las Vegas.
Regardless of the fact Alvarez was beaten that night, he still got paid a reported $100 million, while winner Crawford has stated he took the fight for just $10 million: “I’m doing it for the opportunity, baby,” Crawford said on a podcast. “The legacy outweighs the money.”
While the Saudi influence has skewed the way things work in boxing, paying fighters way beyond any amount they will be making back, traditionally, promoters estimate the profits of a particular show and put up the initial money for a fight based on that, also using that estimate to negotiate a contract with the fighters and networks.
In terms of female fighters, the emergence of Jake Paul’s promotional company Most Valuable Promotions has helped push fighter pay up, with Ireland’s Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano of Puerto Rico both making in the region of $9 million for their trilogy fight in New York last year, thanks in no small part to the boost provided by Netflix as the event broadcaster.
Five-division world champion Claressa Shields also signed a lucrative deal last November, guaranteeing the American a minimum of $8 million for a two-year, four-fight package with Salita Promotions and Wynn Records. The contract included an up-front payment of $3 million, which Shields described as a signing bonus and has potential for significantly higher earnings through revenue sharing.
Though Taylor and Serrano made more in their individual fight contracts, Shields’ contract is the most lucrative multi-fight deal in women’s boxing history.
Sarah Shephard
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, Premier League, WNBA, Golf, Soccer, Boxing, Sports Business, Tennis
2026 The Athletic Media Company
