Highest Paid Athletes in 2021
Conor McGregor, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Dak Prescott all topped $100M in income. Naomi Osaka was the only female athlete in the top 20. The data are from the Forbes 2021 list of highest paid athletes.
Some athletes received over 90% of their earnings from endorsements, including Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. Others received over 95% of their earnings from salary or winnings, including quarterbacks Kirk Cousins, Carston Wentz and Jared Goff and boxer Deontay Wilder.
Highest Paid Athletes of 2021 in a Horizontal Bar Chart
Why Use a Horizontal Bar Chart with Data Column for 20 Highest Paid Athletes
The horizontal bar chart shows the number of smartphone users in 20 countries. I find the horizontal bar format most useful for charts that show a top 20 or top 25 breakdown. 25 items are about the limit for fitting a horizontal bar chart onto a standard PowerPoint slide. I prefer the horizontal bar chart to a vertical one if there are more than 10 categories to display. I used the legend/segment colors to show the sport and put the percentage of off-the-field earnings, which provided additional information about earnings, in the data column.
How I Made this Highest Paid Athletes Horizontal Bar Chart
Here is the data I used to create the chart:
The salary and endorsements numbers were typed in from Forbes. The total and percentage endorsements were computed using formulas. I then moved the data for the athlete to the column that corresponded to their sport.
Here's how I made the highest paid athletes horizontal bar chart with data column:
- create a horizontal stacked bar chart in PowerPoint
- type the data into the Mekko Graphics Data Editor as described above
- press the Switch Bars and Series button to treat the spreadsheet rows as bars and the columns as series
- use the bars and series dialog to show the percentage column as a data column and to hide the columns for salary/winnings, endorsements and total
- add the legend and move to bottom
- hide y axis and x axis line
- adjust internal margins and y axis maximum
- format bar totals as $M and endorsements percentage as %
- change series colors
Take This Chart and Make It Your Own
Download this chart and edit it using Mekko Graphics. See more bar charts in our chart gallery. Here are some other charts that may be of interest:
