Nine tennis players are in the top 15 on the list of the world’s highest-earning female athletes. We’ll tell you who they are and to whom you can bet on next time at 22Bets.
When US magazine Forbes or online platform Sportico publish their lists of the highest-earning female athletes, tennis players are always disproportionately represented. This is also the case in the latest Sportico ranking. Nine of the 15 top earners in global women’s sports are tennis stars.
Athletes from individual sports generally dominate these lists – as is the case in 2024. The only team sport athlete in the top 15 is basketball player Caitlin Clark. Clark, who plays for Indiana Fever in the WNBA, is estimated by Sporticio to earn a total of $11.1 million in 2024. Ninety-nine percent of the total amount comes from advertising deals (including with Nike, Gatorade, State Farm, Wilson, Hy-Vee, Xfinity, Gainbridge, Lilly, and Panini). Only one percent comes from her salary in the WNBA, which amounts to a modest $100,000.
Hardly any top earners in team sports
This highlights the huge difference between team sports and individual sports: although team athletes earn comparable amounts of money through their sponsorship deals, tennis players, for example, receive exorbitantly more in prize money/salary than a player from the WNBA. This difference becomes particularly clear when you look at the number one on the list of highest-earning female athletes.
Coco Gauff takes this spot for the second time after 2023. She is expected to earn a total of more than $30 million in 2024, with her sponsorship money amounting to $20 million – more than double what Caitlin Clark earns. However, Gauff’s prize money is just under $10 million, which is a hundred times Clark’s WNBA salary.
Gauff is only the third female athlete ever to exceed the $30 million mark in a single year, after Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka. In total, the top 15 earned an estimated $221 million – 27 percent more than the previous year. Ten female athletes earned more than $10 million in 2024, compared to “only” six in 2023. Sportico attributes this increase to growing global interest in women’s sports: “Ratings, attendance, sponsorship revenue, TV money – all of these are currently on the rise in women’s sports.”
Raducanu and Osaka are in the top 10
It is mainly female tennis players who are benefiting from this: nine of them are ranked in the top 15. While Coco Gauff, Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, China’s star Zheng Qinwen, Jessica Pegula, Elena Rybakina, and Jasmine Paolini are still reasonably expected to be in this ranking, the two names Emma Raducanu and Naomi Osaka are causing a stir.
Both are even in the top 10, even though they did not have a good season in 2024. They are benefiting from long-term advertising deals with top brands that date back to the days when Osaka dominated women’s tennis (four Grand Slam titles) and Raducanu was considered a great promise for the future (sensational US Open victory in 2021). Osaka and Raducanu are expected to earn more sponsorship money in 2024 than the top women on the tour, Iga Swiatek and Aryna Sabalenka.
To put these amounts into perspective, it is important to understand where they come from. Direct sporting earnings include prize money, salaries, and bonuses in 2024—including Olympic medals and prize money from the Billie Jean King Cup. The estimated income from advertising contracts was determined in discussions with individuals familiar with the marketing agreements and also includes royalties, appearance fees, fees for media appearances, and deals associated with celebrity status. The figures are before taxes and possible agent fees.
