The Impossible Economics of Professional Golf

Tennis too

Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash

Professional golfers. Most Americans can name the greatest. Tiger Woods. Jack Nicklaus. Maybe even Ben Hogan. Perhaps Scottie Scheffler will someday join that list. We see the titans of golf, their tens of millions in winnings, not to mention endorsement deals, and think how nice the life of a professional golfer must be. Making millions to play golf. What a dream.

The reality, however, is that succeeding as a professional golfer is impossible. Like winning the lottery impossible. Yes, there are the few at the very top that make beaucoup bucks. They are the exception that proves the rule. While attempting to become a successful professional athlete in any sport means battling arduous odds, in golf the odds are astronomical.

Looking at the Career Money Leaders list on the PGA tour for men’s golf shows that yes, there are some superstars who have made exceptional amounts of money. There are many golfers not familiar to the average person, or even the casual golf fan, who have raked in tens of millions. That list, however, is pitifully short. By the time the 600th highest-earning golfer is reached, career earnings fail to reach $500,000. This isn’t annual earnings, but earnings over an entire career. Not bad money, but firmly middle class.

All professions in the arts and entertainment have outliers that drive the conversation. The biggest movie stars make far more in a year than an actor in the 80th percentile makes in a career. The most popular musicians make more from one tour than artists who can tour coast-to-coast at small venues will ever make. That said, I’m surprised by how fast the drop-off is for golf. These are lifetime earnings. Of all time. This isn’t how many players have made $1 million in a year or how much players made in 2025. More people graduate from a large high school in a year than have ever made $1,000,000 playing golf.

There are a few caveats that need to be addressed here. First, the PGA data doesn’t correct for inflation. Jack Nicklaus is ranked 339th in career earnings despite being arguably the greatest golfer of all time. He played a long time ago, when winning $1 million was enough to set you up for life. Second, there are some players missing. It looks like those who joined the LIV Tour have been purged from the list - an oddly Soviet approach from the usually benign PGA. Given that the PGA lists 547 golfers who have made the two-comma club, we can conservatively say there are a few hundred additional golfers who would be on the list if we included the LIV golfers. Say a total of 800. Data from Spotrac only ranks the top 200 golfers, but the data supports this assumption. Certainly the number is under 1,000.

Then there are all of the other income streams golfers can make. Professional athletes can make millions for endorsement deals and side hustles. Those income sources, however, are going to be just as skewed as tournament winnings, if not more so, to the best athletes. I suspect many of the golfers in the top 200 lifetime earnings make a lot more from endorsements than their tournament winnings. Once we move down the list, however, those earnings are not going to be in the millions. Maybe not even the hundreds of thousands. A golfer whose never finished in the top ten of a major tournament isn’t going to be highly attractive to sponsors. Additionally, those income streams need to be balanced by expenses. Unlike players of a team sport, golfers are on their own. Equipment will be provided by sponsors, but golfers are going to be responsible for paying coaches, caddies, and transportation costs. These can easily add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars and will balance out a lot of endorsement deals for second-tier players.

Looking at both men’s and women’s tennis, we see a similar skew. There are 843 men’s tennis players who have hit the million-dollar mark. On the women’s side there are 554. Again, tiny, minuscule numbers. If we look at men’s year-to-date earnings, the bleak picture is confirmed: only 281 men’s tennis players this year have made $100,000. When taking into account the travel and development costs every tennis player must pay, this is not an industry to enter.

Compared to team sports it's positively bleak. Consider the Colorado Rockies, currently the worst team in baseball. They have 40 players who are going to be paid over $750,000 for the 2025 season alone. And this is the worst team in Major League Baseball. Multiplying across 30 teams, there are likely more MLB players who will make $750,000 in this year alone than current professional golfers will hit three-quarters of a million over their entire career.

Why are tennis and golf lagging so far behind team sports? I suspect much has to do with popularity. The major golf and tennis tournaments are popular, but there are only four majors in either sport. I couldn’t even tell you what the fifth most important tennis tournament is. Casual fans generally don’t watch non-majors. The fifth biggest baseball game, on the other hand, is usually part of the World Series. Even people with only a passing interest in baseball will watch the 20th biggest game of the year, which is in the playoffs, and many fans will watch well over 100 games each year. This allows for more ticket sales and far-larger TV deals. On top of that, the fifth-best golfer at the Masters is an also-ran. The fifth best hitter in the World Series is usually raking in millions per year and often a household name.

Comparing golfers and tennis players to other sports is bad, but even comparing those athletes to regular people is rough. Making a million dollars over the course of a career, which in tennis is often a decade and in golf significantly longer, isn’t much of an achievement. There are millions of Americans who have made $1 million over the last decade, doing everything from working on Wall Street to working in sales to working as tradesmen. An annual salary $100,000 is a reasonable goal for most. Yet, only a few hundred will hit that mark playing tennis or golf this year.

It’s so hard to make it big in golf or tennis that comparing either sport to playing the lottery turns out to be an unfair comparison… to the lottery. According to the TLC show “The Lottery Changed My Life”, there are around 1,600 Americans who win at least a million dollars in the lottery every year. Trying to become a professional golfer or tennis player has worse odds than winning the lottery. It’s that hard.