Home-field advantage

The potential to make more money at an early age in Australian competitions is keeping many young sport stars here but the top earners, like basketballer Andrew Bogut (pictured), are still based overseas.

For a country of only 22 million people, Australia still punches above its weight when it comes to producing young, talented and rich sports stars.

Young Australians have a history of success at the highest levels in the five most lucrative sports in the world: soccer, golf, tennis, basketball and motor racing.

These sports produced the nine current or former sports stars on the BRW Young Rich List this year: soccer’s Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka, golfers Karrie Webb and Adam Scott, basketballer Andrew Bogut, tennis players Lleyton Hewitt and Pat Rafter and motor sports stars Mark Webber and Chad Reed.

But in stark contrast to the rest of the Young Rich, which is dominated by up-and-coming technology entrepreneurs and financial services whiz-kids, almost all of the sports stars on the list are on the downside of their careers in relation to lucrative endorsement opportunities.

Soccer fans are excited Kewell will be back on the park for the Melbourne Victory in the national A-league soon but his days of earning $15 million and more a year are well and truly over. Though he will probably be the competition’s highest-paid player, that depends on Kewell achieving many of the hurdles in his incentive-based deal.

Webber has signed up to race again next season for the Red Bull formula one team but it may be his last year at the top of the sport. Hewitt is injury prone and rarely plays on the tour, while Reed this year formed his own motocross team at considerable expense.

Only Scott and Bogut – who may not get paid his $US11 million annual contract by the Milwaukee Bucks in the National Basketball Association (NBA) this year as the players’ collective bargaining agreement has expired and the owners have locked them out – arguably have their best years ahead of them. At 31, Scott is still well and truly young enough to break through and win a major golf tournament, while if Bogut, 26, stays relatively free of injury he could play in the NBA for at least another 10 years.

Otherwise, it is the end of an era. And it can be argued there is a lack of new talent coming through to replace those on the list who will fall from it when they turn 41 over the next decade.

Earning the big money that gets an athlete on the list means getting a position on the cutthroat sports tours or competitions overseas and it appears that the number of Australians willing to make the sacrifices necessary to gain those positions may be on the wane.

Even this month’s US Tennis Open champion Samantha Stosur misses the list. Although she got $1.7 million for her win – her biggest cheque ever – she is coming into career best form at the relatively old age of 27.

It is almost certain that no young Australian sports star will ever graduate to the ranks of the BRW Rich 200 list, unlike many emerging technology entrepreneurs.

Several factors are at play. One is the rising Australian dollar, which puts a crimp on the earnings of local athletes overseas when reported back in their home country. Another is the huge growth in the number of athletes from African and Asian countries, who are beginning to dominate soccer teams and the golf tour, meaning fewer opportunities for Australians.

Another factor that is having a profound influence on young talented athletes is the huge growth in salaries available in Australian sports, particularly Australian rules football. In no other sport can young Australians earn as much at such a young age as they can playing for an Australian Football League club.

In recent years, the AFL has targeted rival sports such as basketball (Collingwood star Scott Pendlebury ), rugby league (Karmichael Hunt and Israel Folau , of expansion teams Gold Coast and Greater Western Sydney, respectively), soccer (young Gold Coast Suns player Zac Smith) and cricket (Carlton player Marc Murphy) as a recruiting ground for young talent. All of these players are under 25 years of age and could conceivably have gone on to successful careers in their first-choice sports if the AFL hadn’t come knocking. So it is understandable if a 16 or 17 year old contemplating a career overseas in a sport such as soccer, the most widely played sport in the world, or basketball – in which the best route to the NBA is through the US college system, where players are amateurs – choose the instant riches of the AFL instead. There is no need to slog through feeder competitions or lower leagues in global sports for several years for little reward when quicker riches are available here.

The average salary for an AFL player this year is $236,000 and a few players, such as Gold Coast star Gary Ablett, earn more than $1 million. Under the AFL’s offer to the players for its next collective bargaining agreement (the current one expires this year), the average salary would be $262,000 next year and beyond $300,000 in the last year of the deal, 2016.

Another lucrative career path close to home is cricket. Young players such as David Warner and Steve Smith can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for a stint of only three or four weeks at most, every year, in the Indian Premier League Twenty20 competition.

Relative to the football codes, cricketers are paid extremely well. Former national team captain Ricky Ponting, for example, placed eighth on the BRW top 50 sports earners last year at $3.9 million. But that figure still pales in comparison to what can be earned in the highest leagues and competitions overseas.

Yet with the riches on offer at home, talent that goes abroad could dry up in future. Young sports stars will continue to get rich quickly but won’t accumulate as much wealth as some of the biggest, overseas-based stars of today.

Click here to see the full BRW Young Rich List 2011

BRW

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