In the first two stops of the 2014 FINA World Cup Series, which took place in the same week in Doha, Qatar and Dubai, UAE, Hungarian star Katinka Hosszu earned $125,000 in prize money, thanks in part to 5 World Record breaking swims, each of which came with a $10,000 bonus.
And for that one week, she made a wage the equivalent of her counterparts in other sports.
Different professional sports leagues structure their pay in different ways. In American Football, the NFL, for example, players typically get their salary spread out over the 17-week season. In the NBA, players used to be paid across 6 months, though under the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, most now get paid over 12 months instead.
At the end of the day though, athletes are being paid for the time when they’re competing. We wanted to see how Hosszu’s one-week earning stacked up against the weeks-of-competition pay of different leagues.
If you take Hosszu’s $125,000 in prize money, and extrapolate it out over the length of different American sports seasons, you get:
- NFL (17 weeks): $2,125,000
- NBA (36 weeks): $4,500,000
- WNBA (26 weeks): $3,250,000
- MLB (26 weeks): $3,250,000
- NHL (26 weeks): $3,250,000
- Major League Soccer (32 weeks): $4,000,000
- Soproni Liga (top Hungarian soccer league – 44 weeks): $5,500,000
To put that in real-world, tangible terms, that’s the equivalent of:
- NFL: Late first round draft pick, veteran defensive starter but past his prime
- NBA: good 6th man/5th starter; Carlos Boozer, Mike Dunleavy, Jason Smith
- WNBA: Hosszu’s one-week earnings is more than the WNBA’s veteran maximum salary of $107,000
- MLB: part-time starter in the field, A.J. Ellis (LAD), Kelly Johnson (BAL)
- MLS: Superstar, National team level, Carlos Bocanegra, Landon Donovan, Thierry Henry
- Soproni Liga: If she made that much money for a year, she’d be the best-paid Hungarian athlete in any sport, according to ESPN.
That’s pretty good company, and if there’s anyone in swimming who legitimately competes enough to start creeping into those numbers, it’s Hosszu.
She is the top-earning swimmer in the world right now, excluding endorsements (Michael Phelps, presumably, still leads that category). Some will throw their hands up in frustration at the above, saying that she deserves to be making as much as Lebron James or Albert Pujols or Peyton Manning or other superstars of the above sports. For now, though, that’s not a realistic goal – the economics of swimming just don’t exist yet to justify those kind of paychecks. Even at the World Cups where Hosszu won so much money, ticket sales probably didn’t cover even one World Record bonus for her.
There are a lot of things that would need to change about swimming for anybody to be earning upwards of $10 million a year, or for a bigger number of swimmers to sneak into the $1,000,000 range. That’s the subject for a different post.
What Hosszu is proving, however, is that when you participate consistently and perform consistently as a swimmer, there’s plenty of money to be made in swimming. Hosszu will have another few weeks before the World Cup starts up again and she has another chance to earn as much money, and that’s the key. There are certain weeks in the year where swimmers can make six figure paychecks, but there’s just not enough weeks in the year where those opportunities exist.
Expanding those opportunities is a little bit of a chicken-and-the-egg situation. The organizers, governing bodies, and sponsors need to create more of those opportunities. When USA Swimming finally added race-by-race prize money to its Grand Prix series for the 2012-2013 season, the number of weeks grew by about 6. All-told, there’s probably 15-18 weeks per year where athletes can earn this type of prize money.
But to attract the kind of attention, crowds, and event sponsors to warrant those kinds of prizes, athletes need to show up more consistently as well, and need to be ready to race consistently. Katinka Hosszu is doing a lot of interesting things, but by far her most revolutionary contribution to swimming is that she keeps showing up, week-after-week, and swimming well. Fans know that when they go to a meet expecting to see Katinka Hosszu, they’ll see Katinka Hosszu, they’ll see her often, and that they’ll see her swim out every final that she qualifies for. While she doesn’t go a best time at every meet, she’s prepared to race at every meet. If you go to a FINA World Cup event, you can expect that Hosszu will be there.
The fact that her husband is her coach makes the travel schedule more digestible, but heavy travel is part of being a professional athlete in all sports. Since the European Championships, Hosszu has already competed at three different meets since the European Championships.
Hosszu is garnering a lot of attention for what she’s doing; hopefully, more-and-more athletes see what she’s accomplished and the kind of financial success she’s had and are encourage to participate at the same level. That’s when the momentum will build, and swimming could finally turn the corner into the big leagues.
Thanks for the focus on an issue that all of us want more clarity on. The World Cup series is a great way for elite professional swimmers to earn decent money net of expenses, and it deserves more support from the athletes. Katinka and Chad are both cleaning up in the absence of stiff competition. We’ll done to both of them. The depth of the prize money in other professional sports is also not that great. For example, Tennis players outside the top 150 struggle to break even on the ATP Tour, with a disproportionate amount of the spoils going to the top 4. Outside of central funding, Swimming can’t support more than 20 professional big names. There should be… Read more »
DanJohnRob – I think you make excellent points about Hozzu. I like to think (hope) that her methods of training will be adopted, with individual variances of course, but physically mature swimmers. Obviously different kinds of training are needed for young swimmers, but for fully grown swimmers, more race pace training may be advisable.
And the way th eUS chooses its National Team is just…weird. It leaves little room for late developing swimmers, or for swimmers who simply miss their taper after months of ferocious training. For instance, what of Natalie Coughlin? She is pretty much finished at major international competitions for the next two years. Yet I would argue she is still an elite swimmer. Laura Sogar is much… Read more »
MikeH, It breaks my heart! What happened to Romano, Schmitt, and Luchsinger this year? It bothers me that nobody talks about them. I realize the answers may be complex, and different for each of them, but I’d really like to know if they plan to continue swimming, if they can get financial support, how they’re managing emotionally, etc. Even some of those who made the team really underperformed and were lucky to do so. It frustrates me that Coughlin didn’t try the 50 back or 50 fly, because even with one of those events, if she was swimming fast, she could have been chosen for the relay. Last year she split under 53 on the 4×100, and we could use… Read more »
IIRC, Schmitt got the last National Team spot in the 200 free, and likely has some Pan Ams swims next year if she opts to go to that meet.
In order for a schedule of prize-offering race meets to be successful as a source of income for post-grad swimmers in the US, the coaches training a significant number of these athletes would have to come together and agree to block out certain weeks of the year for competitions. That doesn’t seem like a huge number of coaches/programs, but honestly, I think it would be a bigger roadblock than financing. The kind of training program that necessitates picking the US World Team a year in advance would have to be abandoned, but is deeply entrenched in the US swimming culture.
Frankly, I think USS needs to step-back and take a more objective and perhaps scientific approach to evaluating the success… Read more »
It’s great that she’s able to make such good money in such a short amount of time, but the extrapolations are really just for fun. The facts are that:
1) she (along with Chad le Clos, I think) are by far the top money earners this season, not many others are close,
2) this one weekend doesn’t go on for 17 weeks, 26 weeks, or 36 weeks. You mentioned this in the article, but you also note that there are 15-18 weeks per year where US swimmers can make this type of money. According to USA swimming, though, only $150K prize money is available over the entire Arena Grand Prix series (http://www.usaswimming.org/_Rainbow/Documents/af778c22-cc24-40f6-b144-7b947880aaf8/FINAL%202013-14%20Arena%20Grand%20Prize%20Series%20Rules.pdf). Is… Read more »
Good for her. I think many American swimmers just can’t imagine swimming fast more than twice per year. I’m don’t think that sort of schedule is really necessary to reach our God-given potential. Katinka swam for Dave Salo at USC, and I suspect got used to his race-pace training. That training is probably part of the reason she is ready to swim fast so often.
I watch most of the World Cup meets on Universal Sports, and the lack of high level American participation is puzzling. I don’t really understand it, as most swimmers are not paid particularly well and not swimming at World Cup meets is like leaving money on the table, at least for our top swimmers. In… Read more »
No appearance money or travel expenses covered by FINA at World Cup events, and that hurts participation from swimmers whose success is not guaranteed. IIRC, Anthony Ervin’s indiegogo crowdsourcing fundraising request was $10,000 to cover WC expenses. He swam well enough to earn that back, but it’s not a risk that every athlete wants to take.
The track & field Diamond League. which the WC needs to become if it wants to grow up, has meet management able to pay significant appearance and travel fees in addition to prize money. If memory serves, Lolo Jones has said she makes as much running one race at the Monaco stop of Diamond League as she did for an entire season representing… Read more »
Beachmouse, those are excellent points, I did not realize the World Cup series does not help athletes with hotels/airfare. Hard to fault US swimmers for not flying to the Middle East and Far East. I bet Arena helps its athletes make it to the meet, but that is just a guess.
Just for comparison, an Olympic gold is worth a total of $100,000 from USA swimming/USOC. I think worlds golds are worth roughly $40k each.
So, barring endorsements (by NCAA rules), Missy earned (or should have earned if she can accept everything) about $250,000 in London and something around $150,000 in Barcelona.
By comparison, Ryan Lochte earned an estimated 2.3 million from 2011 to 2012, and has a net worth of $3mil.
Michael Phelps, who not only has been in the major professional spotlight for 11 years, but has been by far the best known swimmer for most of those, has a worth estimated up to $55million. Given the way endorsements work in Olympic years, he probably made at least 12mil… Read more »
This article is totally non-sensical if you look closer at the details and what it takes to make the money Hosszu made. Those pro athletes from other sports get paid whether they play well or not. She’s breaking world records to get bonuses. Let’s just be honest and state as a matter of fact that pro swimmers DO NOT make the money other pro sport athletes make because they’d have to break multiple world records multiple times at multiple meets (i.e., which don’t exist at the moment throughout the year) in order to even get paid as close as other athletes. Now if you gave them “well-compensated” appearance fees and more events per year, then you could argue that they… Read more »
I may be wrong, but doesn’t athletics (track and field) compete for several weeks in Europe during the summer?