Prescott, Messi, Ohtani and more: How the world’s biggest sports stars get paid

It is often the case that the most famous athletes in the world are the highest paid. 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.