Paid For Play

It’s part of the legend of boxing champ and congressman Manny Pacquiao that, while growing up fatherless in an out-of-the-way city on the Philippines’ most southern island, he was a street vendor selling bread, delivering loaves by bicycle. His ascent to the top of the boxing world is rags-to-riches in its most classic form, as he pulled in an estimated US$32 million between two fights last year. In another classic story of boxing champions, he also has a particular talent for spending all of it – as an old acquaintance, a former insider of Ferdinand Marcos’ regime, put it to your columnist, “Now that he’s entered Filipino politics, he’s discovered an entirely new way to lose money.”

Pacquiao is among the highest earners of an intriguing list - recently published by the sports network ESPN - of the richest athletes in the world by country (direct income from the sport only). In addition to satisfying this column’s enduring curiosity about who the wealthiest sportsman of Madagascar is – the wonderfully named Anicet Andrianantenaina, who pulls in a rather white-collar US$86,000 from the French soccer team Auxerre – the list also pointed to some interesting ideas about talent in a global economy.

Bill Gates is fond of saying that, a generation ago, you would rather have been born an above-average student in New York than a genius in Bangalore, but not anymore. It’s an incisive statement about how the world is changing – and sports are one of the places where the change is most evident.

Great talent will find its outlet – even from a starting point of hawking baked goods in Mindanao – but the other side of the coin is that this system is hugely weighted to winners taking, if not all, a hell of a lot. Urban theorist Richard Florida noted in his blog that the political hot-button topic of executive pay was based onthe idea that a CEO of an S&P 500 company made 250 times more than the per capita GDP in the United States. But the most lucratively compensated athlete in America, New York Yankee baseball player Alex Rodriguez, made 715 times the per capita GDP. Australia’s best-paid, basketballer Andrew Bogut, made 230 times the Australian per capita GDP with his US$11.05 million (though, it must be noted, he has to play outside the country to make that). Pacquiao’s rise from Third World squalor has taken him to a place 18,000 times the Philippine per capita.

There’s an object lesson to be drawn from ESPN’s list – if you want your child to go on to a richly rewarded career in sport, get them into soccer. Of the 182 countries surveyed, 114 of them had their top earner drawing their pay cheques from the world game in leagues everywhere, far outpacing the 18 in basketball and 12 in baseball. Curiously, though, in such soccer-mad nations as Brazil, Spain, Italy and England, the wealthiest sportsman was not a footballer. In each case, it was an auto racer: Felipe Massa, Fernando Alonso, Valentino Rossi and Lewis Hamilton respectively. As for those parents who want their children to grow up to be tennis players, pay heed to Andre Agassi’s warnings and steer them away – only Roger Federer rates at his nation’s wealthiest, unless you count Fabrice Santoro as hailing from Tahiti.

But as it is in the wider economy, it’s never quite predictable where the real well-paying jobs are going to come from next. Pacquiao might well be the last of the boxing moguls – his place could be filled by an MMA fighter in the decades ahead. Another interesting phenomenon to keep an eye on is the explosion in cricketing wealth, unleashed by the economic expansion of India. A parallel list of the world’s biggest-spending teams showed a growing presence of IPL sides, a trend which should only continue. To paraphrase Gates, in the future, you would rather be a genius for Royal Challengers Bangalore than an above-average New York Yankee.

- Jeff Centenera