10 Highest-Paid Sports Stars In The World

FC Barcelona's Lionel Messi celebrates after scoring, during the La Liga soccer match between Eibar and Barcelona, at Ipurua stadium in Eibar, northern Spain, Saturday, March 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)
Alvaro Barrientos/AP
When the Premier League renegotiated its most-recent television deal it managed to claim more than £5billion for the rights. This highlights just how huge business modern-day sport is - people are willing to pay to watch the best athletes on the planet, and they will part with huge sums of cash to do so. With the average Premier League salary now at more than £40,000 a week, and with Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao's boxing superfight expected to fetch more than £250million, the economic downturn of the last few years does not seem to have affected sport at all. If anything, sport has benefitted from the last few years - and athletes just keep continuing to get richer. But in which particular sports are revenues, wages and endorsements rising fastest? Which athletes are able to command the highest salaries and sponsorship deals? Well, the athletes with the highest income in 2014 (according to the Forbes rich list) were split across several sports - with two footballers, two golfers, two tennis players, two basketball stars, one American footballer and one boxer. So, here are the 10 sports people with the highest income in 2014 - all of them are men, and they earned a combined £430.9million ($642.4million) between them...

10. 1. Floyd Mayweather Jr - Boxing

FC Barcelona's Lionel Messi celebrates after scoring, during the La Liga soccer match between Eibar and Barcelona, at Ipurua stadium in Eibar, northern Spain, Saturday, March 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Alvaro Barrientos)
Isaac Brekken/AP

Rating: Annual Income: £70.4million ($105.0million)

The American boxer is not nicknamed "The Money" for nothing - and in 2014 he became only the second sports person in history after Tiger Woods to earn more than $100million in a single year. Undefeated in all 47 of his bouts to date, he will bank tens of millions more from his superfight with Manny Pacquiao in May 2015 - while in 2014 he earned £70.4million ($105.0million) to become the highest-earning sportsman in the world.

 
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NUFC editor for WhatCulture.com/NUFC. History graduate (University of Edinburgh) and NCTJ-trained journalist. I love sports, hopelessly following Newcastle United and Newcastle Falcons. My pastimes include watching and attending sports matches religiously, reading spy books and sampling ales.