After a successful return to the pool at last week’s Malmsten Swim Open Stockholm, Swedish superstar Sarah Sjostrom is beginning to round into form nicely as she targets the European Championships this summer.
Despite sitting out of competition for 20 months, from August 2024 until this April while giving birth to her first child, son Adrian, last August, Sjostrom still had an incredibly successful year financially in 2025.
According to Swedish outlet Expressen, Sjostrom’s company, Sarah Sjostrom Promotion AB, generated SEK 5 million in revenue in 2025, leading her to earn a profit of SEK 3.5 million. That’s equivalent to just over $544,000 USD in revenue and $380,000 USD in profit.
The numbers are down from 2024, when Sjostrom won double Olympic gold in Paris in the women’s 50 and 100 free (SEK 7.5 million in revenue and 5 million in profit), but are reportedly better than they were in 2022 and 2023, years in which she won two world titles apiece.
“She has kept a lot of her sponsors during this year that she has not competed,” Sjostrom’s agent Daniel Wessfeldt said via translation, according to Expressen. “She has not had any income from competitive swimming, but still kept partners who have been there and supported her.”
The report notes that Sjostrom’s company now has SEK 25.6 million in equity, an all-time high, and has a strong 85.6% equity ratio.
“It’s because she’s had more time to do other things when she hasn’t had full focus on training and competition,” Wessfeldt said. “It’s resulted in more income from collaborations. When she took a sabbatical to have children, no one immediately wanted to leave her for that reason, but the opposite. That’s probably the big reason, I think.”
Another noteworthy item from the Expressen report is that Wessfeldt says Sjostrom is owed plenty of money from the International Swimming League (ISL), which abruptly stopped operations in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Wessfeldt says Sjostrom has claims in the range of SEK 30 million (just over $3.2 million USD), some of which come from the ISL.
“They owe her several million because there was a war in Ukraine and the person behind it was a Ukrainian billionaire,” Wessfeldt said. “But there are thoughts that it will start again.”
Last December, the ISL laid out plans for a return in either the fall of 2026 or 2027, but there haven’t been any updates on progress through the first three and a half months of 2026.
“There is always a risk that (they may never see the money owed),” Wessfeldt said. “It is force majeure. (The league) hopes to get started again and we have ice in our stomachs (a Nordic expression meaning to stay calm, cool and collected). If there is a restart, they will then do the right thing.”
Well deserved – can’t wait to watch her comeback and road to 2028.
How does those numbers compare to US swimmers?
Wonder what the chances is that she will receive any or part of what is associated with the ISL.
She’ll definitely love that money for her baby and husband