Butt what, exactly, makes the Cowboys, Ronaldo, Nike or CAA so successful? What is it that’s driving the impressive numbers on their balance sheets? It’s the business relationships they have throughout the sports ecosystem.
Nike is able to sell $20 billion worth of shoes annually because it’s directly associated with some of the biggest names in sports – Barcelona, LeBron James and the NFL, to name just a few.
And CAA has built its success upon the sports agency world's most star-studded roster of athletes, boasting a lineup of Eli Manning, Drew Brees, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul, Julio Jones and many, many more.
Those sorts of relationships are the very foundation of the sports business world. And though we’ve long detailed the end results – which teams are most valuable, which players are highest paid – until now nobody has ever done a comprehensive study of how all of those connections fit together to create wealth.
Introducing the FORBES SportsMoney Index, the definitive money ranking in sports. We’ve ranked 430 athletes, agencies, brands and teams, accounting for both their financial power as well as their influential relationships with others in the sports world. To create the SMI, we’ve combined all of FORBES’ SportsMoney annual valuations lists (sports teams, brands, athletes, agencies) and proprietary financial data into a single ranking that reflects their monetary success and how their values affect one another. This is the first time that a cross-category ranking of sports business influence has ever been compiled. For the complete SMI visit www.forbes.com/sports-money-index.
According to forbes.com