Female swimmers and divers are expected to earn three times as much as their male counterparts through name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals, according to an article published by the New York Times.
The article summarizes how much athletes can earn through NIL deals. While it leads with the top earners – football and basketball stars who can pull in over a million dollars in a year – it also provides some data on non-revenue sports.
Unsurprisingly, football and men’s basketball lead the way, with an SEC quarterback expected to earn just over $1 million a year between sponsorships, school-associated collectives (boosters), and other streams of revenue. Data for the most lucrative sports is broken down by position.
Among Olympic sports, swimming and diving has a wide gap between expected earnings for women ($13,519) and men ($4,462). It’s not the widest gap; women also out-earn men dramatically in gymnastics ($20,857 versus $2,282) and volleyball ($10,645 versus $488).
The sport with the widest gap in the opposite direction is golf, where men ($23,101) project to out-earn women ($8,059) by more than $15,000.
All of the data in the article was provided by Opendorse, which advertises itself as “the leading athlete marketplace and NIL technology company.” It is based on all transactions processed between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2024. Sports-specific reports only account for the top 25 earners.
Opendorse was founded in 2012, nine years before NCAA student-athletes could profit off their name, image, and likeness. Today, the platform hosts around 150,000 athletes, both collegiate and professional.
Various sources have told SwimSwam that most swimmers’ earnings in the NIL era aren’t coming from collectives. Instead, they rely on agents who seek out brand deals separate from their school’s athletic department.
This won’t be the final word on the upper limit of NIL earnings. Student-athletes are bound to get more savvy in growing their personal brand, and there will surely be continuing legal battles, House v. NCAA or otherwise.
Men’s Swim and Dive:
Mean: $4k
Median: 10 bucks and a high five
I think that median is probably pretty generous.
Blowing the whole system up for beer money. Sweet!
Don’t worry it will have ten more permutations and one generation will get a lot and next getting screwed.
No matter what they earn, they make more than I ever did which was $0.
My guess is that when examining NIL data the average will tell a fake story. Knowing the median will paint a more clear picture of what life is like for an NCAA athlete.
So USA swimming has a gender pay gap issue – get it together guys! Boycott!!
This probably comes down to something we don’t like to talk about. Outside of the top sports (football, basketball), women can make a lot more in NIL deals than men due to their s*x appeal.
Case in point: Livvy Dunne makes millions in NIL deals, yet has never been one of the top gymnasts in the world, or even in the US.
Female consumers are also more generally fashion conscious than men, and thus more likely to respond with product purchases based upon what influencers tout, endorse and/or wear, hence a female athlete influencer likely generates more sales than a male influencer. NIL deals boils down to two types: (1) payments by fans to induce an athlete to enroll/remain at a school, or (2) payments by merchants seeking influencers who can successfully promote sales of a commercial product. The second category of NIL is procured via agents, while the first is influenced by school affiliated (even though supposedly independent) NIL funds funded by boosters to support a school’s athletic programs (primarily football, basketball).
“Are expected” LOL. Let’s see where the dust settles in year 1 and maybe year 3 of this experiment. Obviously, FB and BB are probably ringers, but I have big money that the non-rev sports are a dud as far as potential earnings. It will be new and shiny for awhile and then a big crash when everybody figures out that the majority of non-rev athletes have zero economic value. Anyhow, maybe a good economic lesson to learn early on.
The influencer market is complicated, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon. Mega influencers are once thing, but most niche companies look for people with much smaller follower counts (1,000 – 10,000). Non-revenue athletes are by definition in a niche market, so as long as non-revenue athletes keep building medium follower bases, companies selling that sport’s equipment will continue to pay them to sell it. Not everyone has what it takes to be an influencer. And it won’t be huge money, but it’ll be something.
“Among Olympic sports, swimming and diving has a wide gap between expected earnings for women ($13,519) and men ($4,462).”
A female swimmer can pull in 13k in NIL? I massively underestimated how much money could be made.
I’d guess these averages are comically skewed toward 5-7 top NCAA women who’ve been Olympic medalists with name recognition who rake on more than all others combined. It’s not as if there’s a large pie that gets cut into many man $13,519 pieces for each. The most pie goes to the very few.
Not a lot – or any really – current NCAA men with the above bling + name recognition to the equal of the Walshes, Huske, Weyant, Sims.