It is a minor sporting curiosity that while the winners of the men’s Grand Slams in tennis earn more money than their golfing counterparts, overall professional golfers are remunerated far more generously than their racket-wielding equivalents.
On the one hand, Carlos Alcaraz collected a cheque for £2.7 million after he won the singles title at Wimbledon in July, which was over £200,000 more than Xander Schauffele received for winning the Open Championship at Royal Troon a week later. On the other hand, there were only two tennis players among the 100 highest-paid athletes of 2023 as compiled by Sportico – Alcaraz (56th) and Novak Djokovic (46th). There were ten golfers amid that number, Schauffele not being among them.
The golfers in question were Jon Rahm (2), Rory McIlroy (13), Tiger Woods (14), Viktor Hovland and Scottie Scheffler (somewhat bizarrely, tied for 27th), Brooks Koepka (39), Cameron Smith (51), Jordan Spieth (53), Talor Gooch (61) and Dustin Johnson (86). You will doubtless have figured that half of those – Rahm, Koepka, Smith, Gooch and Johnson – play on the LIV Golf circuit.
Their top man, Rahm, was listed with earnings of $203 million, $181 million coming from salary and winnings and $22 million from endorsements. On the overall list, he was sandwiched between two football greats: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, being about $72 million shy of the Portuguese and the same amount north of the Argentine.
You might conclude that being a LIV player helps to establish a good relationship with one’s bank manager. (Silly me; I mean offshore trust investment adviser.) But one thing being a LIV golfer does not help with is being on a Ryder Cup team. Only Koepka among the LIV contingent played in Rome last year. But Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton both seem eager to be at Bethpage Black next year, and hope to work that out with the European Tour Group.
The sticking point may be the payment of the fines that have been levied against them for participating in LIV events without having secured the requisite authorisation. Then, on Tuesday, the European captain, Luke Donald, revealed that Sergio Garcia (the all-time Ryder Cup record points-scorer but aged 44 and hardly pulling up any on-course trees these days) was contemplating paying fines totalling in excess of £1.5 million in order to have a chance of playing in New York in September. “He understands everything that’s involved,” said Donald. “The decision has to go to him whether he’s prepared to do all that.”
The Ryder Cup may be important to Garcia but it is vital to the DP [European} World Tour. Last Monday, Money in Sport published an analysis of the organisation’s finances. It said revenues from the 2023 match in Rome were 40% up on 2018 in Paris (good!) but profits were 40% down (bad!). The board’s directors, you may not be wholly surprised to learn, attributed this to “macro-economic pressures, driven by post-COVID supply chain challenges and the disruption caused by the war in Ukraine”. Money in Sport commented: “This explanation doesn’t come close to explaining how the profit margin could collapse from 20% in Paris to only 9% in Rome…”
Right, I’m off to meet with Rachel Reeves or those guys who do Manchester City’s books…
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You can follow Robert Green on Twitter @robrtgreen and enjoy his other blog f-factors.com as well as his golf archive on robertgreen-golf.com
