The financial landscape of women’s sports is exploding, and the latest earnings list proves it with a jolt. Tennis continues to dominate economically, placing ten players in the top 15, with Coco Gauff holding the No. 1 spot for the third straight year at a staggering $31 million. Aryna Sabalenka sits just behind her with $30 million, pushing the sport’s long-standing stranglehold on female athlete earnings even further. But hidden inside this tennis-heavy hierarchy is the story shaking up the entire world of team sports.
Caitlin Clark — yes, the rookie who turned the WNBA upside down — is the only team-sport athlete to crack the top 15. And she did it after missing 70% of the Indiana Fever’s games in the 2025 season due to injuries. With $16.1 million in total earnings, Clark surged four spots higher compared to 2024, despite making only $119,000 in league salary. Her ascent is nothing short of unprecedented: a 23-year-old who turned record-breaking viewership, explosive fan culture, and global sponsorship demand into a commercial empire that even seasoned champions can’t match.
What Clark represents is bigger than a ranking. She’s the clearest proof yet that women’s team sports are no longer stuck in the economic shadows of tennis and golf. Brands are chasing her, audiences are following her, and the marketplace is finally paying attention to what the numbers have been screaming all year: star power in women’s sports is shifting — fast and loudly.
Sportico notes that the 15 highest-paid women span seven countries and skew remarkably young: seven are under the age of 25. This new generation is global, ambitious, digitally savvy, and unwilling to accept limits that existed even five years ago. They’re reshaping the sports economy not with slow progress but with seismic cultural impact.
Still, Clark’s leap remains the most electrifying figure in the report. She walked into the WNBA with a rookie contract and walked out of the year as one of the world’s wealthiest female athletes — a trajectory so steep it would have been unimaginable in team sports a decade ago.
The only question now is whether this is her peak…
or just the beginning of a financial revolution that could blow the roof off women’s sports entirely.
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