By Braden Keith on SwimSwam
After every swim meet that ever happens on earth, there are complaints about how “pathetic” and “tragic” the prize money is.
So the chorus rang loud this week after, for the second straight stop at the Pro Swim Series meet, the leading money earner, in this case Kate Douglass, earned $7,500 for her efforts in Westmont.
I always have a lot to say about the prize money debate. In essence, there are only a few places from whence to generate more prize money, and this is basically true of all professional sports:
Fan money Sponsor money Government money Benevolent billionaires Age group fees (unique to Olympic sports, where the pros and age group swimmers exist under the same umbrella)The reality is that for the last 25-or-so years, USA Swimming and its athletes have not held up their end of the bargain with the fans, media, or public. ‘We don’t owe you anything’ is a righteous cry – until you want something (in this case more prize money). Mainstream media coverage of the sport has eroded thanks to a lack of access to athletes and a lack of appearances.
While the new administration is doing a much better job with these areas, this is not a switch that is flipped overnight. It will probably take a whole new generation of swimmers who haven’t been explicitly trained to fear public reaction before we see a return in interest to the sport.
All of that is a digression to the point of this article. What I wanted to do was take major professional sports leagues around the United States and the world, and compare the per-event pay.
This comparison will not create perfect analogies for a lot of reasons. For one, these other pro sports leagues absolutely dwarf swimming in the amount of revenue generated. The average NFL revenue per game (roughly $70-$80 million) is significantly larger than USA Swimming’s annual budget. And even that comparison doesn’t account for the fact that the revenue generated by each Pro Swim Series meet is probably less than the $116,500 prize money budget – because most of USA Swimming’s annual budget isn’t driven by pro swimming.
The structure of pay is also different for swimmers – they, in general, have to cover more of their own training costs than in other pro sports (though not always).
But I still found it to be an interesting for a few reasons.
One is because I think it brings more context to what pro athletes in other sports are actually getting paid. If swimmers showed up to 162 dates of competition per year, they would probably make a lot more money. See: Katinka Hosszu, who is believed to be the first swimmer to earn over $1 million in race prize money – and she passed that number in 2014. She built herself significant wealth through swimming by just showing up over and over and over.
But I think sports fans have become so overwhelmed by the scale of numbers of American pro sports (and semi-pro sports, like college football) that they’ve forgotten that $7,500 in a weekend is actually a decent rate of pay relative to most of the world’s sports.
Minimums Per League (all in USD)
Minimum Per Competition Minimum Per Date of Play NFL $52,500 Major League Baseball $15,000* $4,814* NBA $15,522 MLS $3,058 NWSL $1,683 WNBA $1,501 PWHL $1,237 Premier League Soccer $18,421** Italian Men’s Volleyball League $1,363*** LOVB $3,500Caveats
*I think you could look at a three-game Major League Baseball series as the equivalent of a weekend at the Pro Swim Series
**Estimated based on lowest publicly available salaries. No firm minimum
***Estimated based on lowest publicly available salaries. No firm minimum. Often has living expenses covered.
While the minimum per competition pay rates of, say, the NFL, dwarfs what Kate Douglass earned this weekend, players in the Professional Women’s Hockey League would be thrilled to receive $2,500 for each day they played. The top players in that league make in the low six-figures, between $3,500-$4,000 per game.
To bring my point full circle: through the first 61 games of the PWHL season, average attendance was 8,650 per game, a 17% increase over the previous season. The Pro Swim Series meet this weekend had maybe a couple hundred spectators at its peak.
Swimming needs to continue working on the underlying economics of the sport before we can expect floods of money to roll in. We also need to remember that the Pro Swim Series meets are very low on the swimming prize money totem pole. Douglass made $182,000 across the three meets of the World Cup last year, for example. A top 20 type swimmer who really commits to the full circuit could easily clear half-a-million dollars in prize money and meet appearance fees in a year.
Just because a Kate Douglass can earn $182,000 at the World Cup Series doesn’t meant she should expect to earn $182,000 at every meet she attends.
So then the challenge becomes bringing up the floor and increasing the depth. Creating more professional opportunities for more swimmers is crucial to developing a more sustainable ecosystem. There are swimmers for whom $7,500 might determine if they can continue training another year or not. The above, of course, is a comparison to minimums in different leagues, and the maximums in all of those leagues make astronomically more money.
It’s ultimately a see-saw. USA Swimming bumped up prize money a little bit this year (and APA money, which should probably be factored into the swimming calculations). Okay great – now it’s time for the swimmers to do their part, and make their media appearances, not leave empty lanes, and promote the meets on their social media accounts to draw more fans.
Then more fans come, more media pay attention, and then it’s USA Swimming’s move to continue increasing the prize money.
The chicken and the egg is really neither the chicken nor the egg. Each successive generation of proto-chicken became more-and-more like the chicken we know today. If swimming can band together and focus on this “little bit more in each edition,” we have a chance at looking up in five years and seeing athletes who are fairly compensated.
But if we expect a tiny dinosaur to wake up one morning and give birth to a big ole’ chicken, then I think we’re going to be sorely disappointed.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Comparing What Swimmers Make to What Pro Athletes in Other Sports Make (On a Per Match Basis)
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