Sports and Income

Click on image to see all 5 graphics

From An Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States

Million-dollar salaries can be found in professional sports but some of the highest-earning players supplement their incomes with endorsement deals, e.g. Tiger Woods. However, looking at the history of Major League Baseball, we can see a dramatic increase in just the salaries of the highest-paid baseball players since the 1970s, although compared to CEOs or other celebrities their income looks more "modest".

 Read Online to view all to the graphics from my book.  These graphs were created using OmniGraphSketcher copied into Adobe Illustrator for additional annotations. 

Data from 

Freedman, Jonah. “The 50 Highest-Earning American Athletes: The Fortunate 50, 2010.” Sports Illustrated, Summer 2011. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/specials/fortunate50-2010/index.html.

———. “The 50 Highest-Earning American Athletes: The Fortunate 50, 2011.” Sports Illustrated, Summer 2011. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/specials/fortunate50-2011/index.html.

Haupert, Michael. “The Economic History of Major League Baseball.” EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. December 3, 2007. http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haupert.mlb.

“2010 Baseball Team Payrolls.” About.com Baseball. July 6, 2012. http://baseball.about.com/od/newsrumors/a/2010baseballteampayrolls.htm.

USA Today. “USATODAY Salaries Databases.” July 5, 2012. http://content.usatoday.com/sportsdata/baseball/mlb/salaries/player/top-25/2010.

NYTimes: More Than Ever, It Pays to Be the Top Executive

The New York Times had a graph on executive income for the article More Than Ever, It Pays to Be the Top Executive that shows the growing income gap between chief executives and their top subordinates. The article goes on to mention this "winner take all" behavior can be found in other industries like sports and entertainment. You can see more examples of this in the following graphs: Highest Paid CEOs Highest Paid CEOs vs Hedge Fund Managers US Income Distribution Highest Paid Athletes Highest Paid Celebrities Income/GDP Ratio Income share going to the top 5%

2005 US Income Distribution part 3

I went back to my 2005 US Income Distribution graph but this time I looked at the income of everyone above $250,000. Although one can find lists of high income earners it is very difficult to find a graph plotting their earnings as compared to everyone else. The scale of the graph is so extreme that most of the population ends up looking like a dot at the bottom of the graph. Below I have created 3 graphs that try to show the relationship between the bottom 99.99% and the top 0.01%.

The original Census data can be found at Table HINC-06. Income Distribution to $250,000 or More for Households

The bottom 99.99% I estimated from data found at Emmanuel Saez's web site

The CEO and Celebrity income estimates came from Forbes magazine

And finally the income for the top hedge fund managers was first published at Alpha magazine but I found it via the New York Times

See Also: Part 1 and Part 2 

CEO Median Compensation in 2004 ($14m)

From a USA Today article

CEOs pulled in median compensation of about $14 million in 2004, up 25% from 2003, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the largest public companies filing annual proxies through March 25. Compensation includes salary, bonus, incentives, stock awards, stock-option gains and potential returns from fresh option grants. Data were provided by executive-pay-tracker eComp Data Services.

If you remember from my post on the income reported by President and Vice President, $14 million is greater than both of them put together. Also this means that over half of the CEOs of the largest public companies are in the Top 0.01%.

Highest paid CEO in 2004

A list of highest paid CEOs, according to Forbes, based on their salary and bonus, vested restricted stock grants and the value realized from exercising stock options during the just-concluded fiscal year. The number 1 CEO is:

Terry S Semel Total Compensation: $230.6 mil (#1) Terry S Semel has been CEO of Yahoo (YHOO) for 4 years. Mr. Semel has been with the company for 4 years . The 62 year old executive ranks 1 within Software & Services