Updated June 4, 2026.
In 2017, the world's top sports endorsement earner was Roger Federer at roughly $60 million. He retired in 2022.
In 2025, the world's highest-paid athlete is Cristiano Ronaldo at $275 million — a record for a soccer player and the third-highest single-year total ever recorded for an athlete. He is 41 and still playing for Al-Nassr in the Saudi Pro League.
That gap is the story. In nine years, the top-of-market for sports influence has grown four-and-a-half times. The economics of athlete influence have not just inflated — they have been rebuilt. The mechanism that paid Federer $60 million is not the mechanism that pays Ronaldo $275 million. The structural shifts behind that gap are what the brand-side world needs to understand in 2026.
This is the updated 10 Leading Sports Influencers list — and the four structural shifts that changed the economics between 2017 and 2025.
In this analysis
- What Changed Between 2017 and 2025 — Four Structural Shifts
- The 10 Leading Sports Influencers — 2025 Forbes Rankings
- Who's Missing — the Women's Sports Gap
- The Emerging Dimension — AI Citation Share
- Adjacent EPR Frameworks
- Communications Concepts
- Related Case Studies
- Frequently Asked Questions
What Changed Between 2017 and 2025 — Four Structural Shifts
Four shifts explain the Federer-to-Ronaldo gap. None of them are about social media followers. They are about how the money is structured.
1. Saudi money. The Public Investment Fund and adjacent Saudi state vehicles rewrote the top of the athlete pay market beginning in 2022. Ronaldo's Al-Nassr salary alone is north of $200 million annually — itself a sponsorship arrangement disguised as a player contract. Karim Benzema's Al-Ittihad deal. Neymar's brief Al-Hilal era. LIV Golf's full-roster acquisition. The Tyson Fury — Oleksandr Usyk fights, both held in Riyadh. The Saudi capital flow has built a parallel top tier of athlete compensation that exists outside the historical European-and-American sponsorship structure.
2. Streaming and equity-attached media deals. Lionel Messi's Inter Miami deal includes equity participation in Apple's MLS streaming business. The compensation is no longer "salary plus endorsements." It is "salary plus endorsements plus equity in the distribution platform." This structure pays athletes for the value they create for the platform — not just the value they create for the team. Tom Brady's signing with Fox before the streaming era looked one way; LeBron James's eventual post-playing media deal will look another.
3. Equity compensation inside endorsement deals. Stephen Curry's 2023 Under Armour contract extension is the case study. The deal carries $75 million in stock compensation that vests in 2029 and 2034. Curry is no longer endorsing Under Armour. He is effectively a long-tenured equity holder in the brand he represents. The endorsement-as-equity structure is now standard for top-tier athletes negotiating long-term brand relationships. Skechers, Fanatics, and several DTC apparel brands have followed the template.
4. Athlete-owned brands replacing athlete endorsements. Ronaldo owns CR7 (eyewear, fragrance, underwear, hospitality). LeBron co-founded SpringHill and is the anchor of Klutch Sports. Durant co-founded Thirty Five Ventures. Curry co-founded SC30 Inc and Unanimous Media. Serena Williams launched Serena Ventures. The 2026 model is that the most marketable athletes are not just endorsers — they are operators of their own brand portfolios, capturing the equity upside that previously went to the brands that signed them. The pattern transfers across categories — see Snoop Dogg's Casa Verde Capital for the non-athlete celebrity-operator parallel.
Those four shifts produced the Federer-to-Ronaldo gap. The list below reflects what the new economics look like at the top.
The 10 Leading Sports Influencers — 2025 Forbes Rankings
The Forbes 2025 list covers earnings from May 2024 to May 2025. Numbers include both on-field salary and off-field endorsements, since the two are now structurally entangled.
1. Cristiano Ronaldo (soccer · Al-Nassr · Portugal) — $275M. Third consecutive year at #1. Salary in the Saudi Pro League is the bulk. Endorsements with Nike (lifetime deal), Herbalife, Clear, Whoop, and his own CR7 brand portfolio. Recent investments include the Vista Alegre porcelain manufacturer and the supplement brand Bioniq.
2. Stephen Curry (basketball · Golden State Warriors · USA) — $156M. The Under Armour extension is the structural fact: $75 million in stock compensation vesting in 2029 and 2034. Also: Subway, Rakuten, Chase, Callaway. The canonical equity-attached endorsement case.
3. Tyson Fury (boxing · UK) — $146M. The Usyk fights drove most of this. Boxing remains the highest-leverage individual sport for single-year earnings spikes — one heavyweight fight can produce nine-figure paydays.
4. Dak Prescott (NFL · Dallas Cowboys · USA) — $137M. The first NFL quarterback to reach the Forbes top five. The 2024 four-year, $240M Cowboys extension is the driver. Endorsements include Adidas, AT&T, Sleep Number, DirecTV.
5. Lionel Messi (soccer · Inter Miami · Argentina) — $135M. The Apple TV+ MLS deal is structurally novel — Messi's contract includes equity in Apple's MLS streaming business. Adidas (lifetime deal). The Más+ sports drink venture. Long-tail global endorsements across continents.
6. LeBron James (basketball · LA Lakers · USA) — $133.8M. Twenty-plus year endorsement portfolio. Nike lifetime deal (estimated $1 billion total value). PepsiCo, Walmart, Beats by Dre, AT&T. The SpringHill Company production house and the Klutch Sports cluster make LeBron a celebrity operator (see EPR's LeBron James profile), not just an endorser.
7. Juan Soto (baseball · NY Mets · Dominican Republic) — $114M. The Mets contract is the largest in MLB history. Endorsements relatively narrow compared to peers — baseball's brand-deployment infrastructure remains weaker than the NBA's, NFL's, or soccer's.
8. Karim Benzema (soccer · Al-Ittihad · France) — $104M. Saudi Pro League salary plus French and global endorsements. Adidas, Puma, plus Saudi-tier brand visibility.
9. Shohei Ohtani (baseball · LA Dodgers · Japan) — $102.5M. The Dodgers contract structure defers most of the on-field money. The endorsement portfolio is the immediate income — New Balance, Hugo Boss, Kose, Seiko, plus a deep Japanese endorsement layer.
10. Kevin Durant (basketball · Houston Rockets · USA) — $101.4M. NBA salary plus endorsements with Nike, Coinbase (pre-2022 issues), and the Thirty Five Ventures portfolio Durant co-founded with Rich Kleiman. Like LeBron, Durant is structurally a celebrity operator.
Who's Missing — the Women's Sports Gap
The Forbes top 10 in 2025 is all male. That is the same pattern as 2017. The 2017 list had no women either.
This is the visible failure mode of the existing endorsement-economics infrastructure. The top women's athletes — Coco Gauff, Iga Świątek, Aryna Sabalenka, Caitlin Clark, A'ja Wilson, Sabrina Ionescu, Nelly Korda — are earning multiples of what their 2017 counterparts earned, but the absolute numbers still fall below the male top-10 cutoff.
Caitlin Clark is the case study to watch. Her endorsement portfolio (Nike, Gatorade, State Farm, Wilson, Panini) grew faster between 2024 and 2026 than any athlete in any sport. The brand-fit case for her is structurally sound across consumer categories. The Forbes dollar number will catch up to the brand traction, but slowly.
For brand teams in 2026, the gap is the opportunity. The women's-sports rosters — WNBA, tennis, golf, the Olympic-cycle athletes building toward LA 2028 — are the most undervalued category in sports marketing right now.
The Emerging Dimension — AI Citation Share
One layer on top of all of the above. Brand teams in 2026 are increasingly running their athlete-shortlist queries through ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini before consulting their agencies. The AI engines anchor their answers to athletes with the highest open-web entity density.
The Forbes-dollar leaders are not always the AI Citation Share leaders. Ronaldo, Messi, LeBron, and Curry dominate both. Baseball is heavily underweighted in AI Citation Share globally — Soto and Ohtani get cited far less often than their earnings rank suggests. Caitlin Clark's AI Citation Share is rising faster than her dollar earnings. That gap — between citation density and endorsement dollars — is where the next decade's athlete brand-deals will be priced.
Adjacent EPR Frameworks
The endorsement-economics shifts documented in this piece intersect three broader EPR frameworks:
- UHNW Communications: How Billionaires Manage Reputation. Every athlete in the top 10 above operates inside UHNW communications discipline alongside the celebrity-athlete brand architecture. Ronaldo, Messi, Curry, LeBron, and Durant are all billionaires or approaching billionaire status; the family-office coordination, philanthropic-infrastructure protection, and answer-engine accuracy compliance functions all apply.
- Regulated Industries PR — When Paid Advertising Is Blocked. The FTX celebrity-endorsement crisis (covered separately in EPR's FTX endorsement piece) reset celebrity endorsement economics in crypto, and the sports-betting partnership economy (DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM athlete endorsements) operates inside the broader regulated-industries discipline. Endorsement deals in regulated categories now require legal substantiation that other categories don't.
- Sports PR — Leagues, Teams, Athletes, and the AI Communications Era. The pillar framework for athletic celebrity-operator architecture.
- Cannabis Branding for the Normalization Era. The Casa Verde / Snoop celebrity-cannabis-fund pattern is the non-athlete parallel for the athlete-owned-brand model — different category, same structural conversion from endorsement to ownership.
Communications Concepts
Concepts referenced in this analysis:
- Influencer Marketing — the brand-side discipline of using athlete and celebrity reach to drive consumer awareness, consideration, and purchase. The 2026 version of athlete influencer marketing now includes equity participation, athlete-owned brand partnerships, and AI-engine brand-discovery considerations.
- Endorsement Economics — the financial mechanics of celebrity-brand deals. The 2017 model was dollar-for-dollar (athlete signs, brand pays, period). The 2026 model is dollar plus equity plus athlete-platform participation.
- Brand Fit — the strategic alignment between athlete identity and brand identity. The 5W Celebrity-Brand Fit Index is the sector-by-sector framework for evaluating this dimension. Fit determines whether endorsement spend converts to commerce or just visibility.
- Athlete Branding — the discipline of building an athlete's identity as a standalone commercial asset, not just an extension of their sport. Ronaldo's CR7, LeBron's SpringHill, Durant's Thirty Five Ventures are the canonical operator-level cases.
Related Case Studies
- The Fall of FTX and Celebrity Endorsement — when endorsement deals create legal exposure
- Tiger Woods' Meteoric Drop — TAG-Heuer — endorsement economics in collapse
- LeBron James — A Celebrity PR Profile — the 20-year endorsement arc
- Ronda Rousey — UFC Pioneer to 17-Second Close
- UFC Marketing and Social Media — the Celebrity-Making Machine
- Snoop Dogg — Cross-Category Operator
- The Celebrity-Brand Fit Index — 5W's sector-by-sector framework
- EPR's full Celebrity PR Case Studies archive
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is the highest-paid athlete in the world in 2025?
Cristiano Ronaldo, with $275 million in total earnings from May 2024 to May 2025, per Forbes. His salary at Saudi Pro League club Al-Nassr accounts for the bulk of the figure, with the remainder coming from endorsements (Nike lifetime deal, Herbalife, Clear, Whoop) and his CR7 brand portfolio.
What changed in sports endorsement economics between 2017 and 2025?
Four structural shifts: (1) Saudi capital rewrote the top of the athlete pay market through Al-Nassr, Al-Ittihad, LIV Golf, and Riyadh boxing events; (2) streaming and equity-attached media deals like Messi's Apple TV+ MLS arrangement; (3) equity compensation inside endorsement deals like Stephen Curry's $75M Under Armour stock package; (4) the shift from athletes endorsing brands to athletes owning brands — CR7, SpringHill, Thirty Five Ventures, SC30, Serena Ventures.
How is the 2025 list different from earlier years?
Saudi Pro League soccer salaries pushed soccer players to the top. NBA second-tier stars are now near-equal to first-tier salary earners due to off-field equity. NFL quarterbacks entered the top 10 for the first time, driven by recent contract extensions. Boxing remains volatile — Tyson Fury's ranking reflects one fight cycle.
Are there women on the 2025 Forbes top 10?
No. The 2025 Forbes top 10 highest-paid athletes is all male, the same pattern as 2017. The top women's athletes (Coco Gauff, Caitlin Clark, A'ja Wilson, Iga Świątek) have grown their endorsement portfolios significantly but fall below the male top-10 cutoff in absolute dollars. Clark's brand-fit traction is rising faster than her dollar ranking.
Who are the emerging sports endorsement stars in 2026?
Caitlin Clark (WNBA), Coco Gauff (tennis), Sabrina Ionescu (WNBA), Nelly Korda (golf), and a cohort of NFL quarterbacks beyond Prescott (Mahomes, Burrow, Allen, Jackson). The WNBA cohort broadly is the most undervalued category in sports marketing right now.
What is the future of sports endorsements?
The endorsement-as-equity model is now standard for top-tier athletes. The athlete-owned-brand model (CR7, SpringHill, Thirty Five Ventures) is replacing pure endorsement deals at the top of the market. Brand teams are increasingly running athlete-shortlist queries through AI engines as a brand-discovery layer alongside traditional agency relationships.
