Hey Steemians!
Let's talk about sports and money. I want to talk about tennis for a bit, because I really like it and I think I am not the only one.
Some news first: Currently it is the China Open in Beijing and they are playing the semi-finals today. The first has already finished, Rafael Nadal beat Grigor Dimitrov for the 9th time in his career. He is going to face either Alexander Zverev, the 20-year old German or the 22-year old Nick Kyrgios. They are playing this afternoon. The stake is big, whoever wins, pockets more than $650,000. Not bad for playing seven matches over 7 days.
Fun fact: prize money for the women trophy at the same event is more than $1,000,000. It doesn’t happen often that the women get more money than the men.
Tennis is a very popular and elegant sport. More and more kids are starting to play and hope to become professionals one day. As you can see, the possible earnings are quite remarkable.
Unfortunately, not everybody can become a Rafael Nadal or a Roger Federer who both earned more than $85,000,000 in their careers.
The competition is fierce and they say you have to be top 100 in the ATP rankings to make a living out of tennis. It is very difficult to make it into the top 100. Tennis a really demanding sport, they are travelling all year, sleeping in hotel rooms (and not always in the best ones), they have to pay their own expenses. They also have to defend their points from the previous year otherwise they lose a lot of positions and so money.
I was curious and checked how much has the current 100th player made so far in 2017. According to the ATP website, his name is Alexnder Bublik from Kazakhstan and he earned $195,000. Sounds good but if you deduct the expenses (accommodation, tickets, coach salary etc.) then it is not that fabulous.
Ok don’t get me wrong, I would be a very happy 100th or even a 102nd tennis player travelling around the world.
My argument is that you can make a very nice amount of money by playing tennis, but there are a lot sports that pay a lot better and you don’t have to be top 100 (of course there are a lot of sports that pay a lot worse). I did a little research and here is another fun fact: the average salary in the MLB (baseball in Noth America) is $4,000,000 and they get $100 per day for meals. HAHAHAHA. They get pocket money to eat.
What is the conclusion? If you are lucky and hard worker enough to be a top sportsman, just go for it. You are not doing it for the money anyway.
If you are really lucky enough to be in one of the popular and well-paying sports, then even better.
Thanks for reading!
See you next time and don’t forget, Vamos Steemit!!!
Sources:
http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/players/marton-fucsovics/f724/overview
http://ftw.usatoday.com/2015/04/major-league-baseball-average-salary-meal-money-2015-mlb