'MayPac' tops list and MMA is left out of the '100 Highest Paid Athletes'

Mayweather (left) and Pacquiao (right) faced each other in May, in Las Vegas (USA). Photo: John Gurzinski/AFP

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MMA is, without a doubt, one of the sports that is growing the most in popularity on the planet and, every day, the numbers involved in the business are increasing. However, this was still not enough to place fighters in the sport among the highest paid in the world. In the 2015 edition of the traditional list of “Forbes” magazine that publishes the “100 Highest Paid Aletas”, there is no name from mixed martial arts.

The MMA representative who came closest to the 100 highest-paid athletes in the sport was Ronda Rousey, whose maturities for the year reached US$6,5 million. However, the number of the undefeated UFC champion is still far from the 100th place in the ranking, the NBA player James Harden, whose salary was almost three times higher, US$ 16,5 million.

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Protagonists of the most profitable fight in the history of the sport, in May this year, boxers Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao together pocketed almost half a billion dollars, US$ 300 million for the North American and another US$ 160 million for the Filipino. To give you an idea of the disparity in salaries between the duo and the other names on the list, the amount earned by “MayPac” is almost equivalent to the sum of the salaries of all the other eight athletes in the top-10.

In addition to Mayweather and Pacquiao in first and second positions, respectively, the list of the ten highest-paid athletes by “Forbes” was dominated by representatives from football, golf, basketball and tennis.

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