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Caitlin Clark’s highly-decorated 2024 rookie season proved to be fairly profitable for the Indiana Fever star as nicely.
In keeping with Kurt Badenhausen of Sportico, Clark “generated a document annual payday for a WNBA participant of $11.1 million with 99 p.c of the full earned off the court docket.”
Sportico @Sportico
Clark made her checklist debut on @kbadenhausen‘s world’s highest-paid feminine athletes, because of an estimated $11 million in endorsement earnings, together with her NIL cash whereas at Iowa. She at the moment has sponsorship offers with @Nike, @Gatorade, @StateFarm, Wilson, @HyVee, @Xfinity,… https://t.co/bacyuvW6iy pic.twitter.com/OvCF2bsXF2
That included an “estimated $11 million in endorsement earnings” on prime of her base wage of $76,535 and bonuses for being an All-WNBA first-team choice ($10,300), the WNBA Rookie of the Yr ($5,150), an All-Star choice ($2.575), a WNBA All-Rookie Workforce choice ($1,500) and reaching the primary spherical of the playoffs ($1,136).
Tennis star Coco Gauff topped the list at $30.4 million in earnings from prize cash and endorsements, adopted by skier Eileen Gu ($22.1 million) and tennis participant Iga Świątek ($21.4 million).
Sportico @Sportico
The 2024 Highest-Paid Feminine Athlete checklist is right here! The newest from @kbadenhausen, tennis gamers dominate the checklist, with Coco Gauff main the way in which with $30.4M in earnings this yr.
Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.Try the total checklist: https://t.co/UAHvschj4f pic.twitter.com/AURKTeK5Mb
In whole, 9 of the 15 highest earners in ladies’s sports activities had been tennis gamers, alongside three golfers (Nelly Korda, Jeeno Thitikul, Lydia Ko) and one gymnast (Simone Biles).
WNBA All-Star Sabrina Ionescu simply missed the top-15 lower.
Clark, 22, stays one of the ascendant younger skills in all of sports activities, and continues to assist construct what was already a rising rise in recognition for girls’s basketball. She took the college game by storm at Iowa, serving to the Hawkeyes set attendance document, and people frequent sellouts adopted her to the Fever.
She is barely scratching the floor of her potential on the court docket, and her incomes energy ought to have an equally excessive ceiling. Clark is just not the face of the WNBA simply but, given the immense expertise within the league, however she is actually trending in that route.
Her modest base wage additionally introduced into extra mainstream focus the acute disparity of pay between the NBA and WNBA. The highest total decide within the 2024 NBA draft, Zaccharie Risacher—far, far much less of a family title than Clark—entered the league with a four-year, $57 million contract that’s paying him $12.6 million within the 2024-25 season.
Even with endorsements and NIL offers from the top of her faculty profession, Clark did not match that quantity in 2024.