Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova during the 2015 Australian Open final.
Serena Williams is a 20-time Grand Slam singles champion. She’s completed the career golden slam, a “Serena Slam” (holding all four titles at the same time) and, if she wins Wimbledon this year, will be one US Open sized step away from being the first woman to complete the calendar year Grand Slam since Steffi Graf in 1988. As you’d expect from such a wealth of success, the American has collected a fair amount of prize money along the way: $69.7 million, to be precise. That puts her first on the all-time list of female tennis players, and fourth on the all-time list of both men and women.
By comparison (and only by comparison), Maria Sharapova’s tennis career is a blundering failure. The Russian has won a “meagre” five Grand Slam titles and “only” an Olympic Silver. That success, or relative lack thereof, has raked in a “piffling” $34.9 million: pretty much half that won by the younger Williams sister.
So, Serena is considerably richer than her Russian rival, right? Wrong.
While on the court Williams may have trophy-collecting down to a fine art, off it Maria Sharapova is nothing short of a money-making machine. She has endorsements with the likes of Porsche, Tag Heuer and Evian. Nike pay her $9 million-a-year to wear half-a-dozen swooshes about her person, while Head hand over $2 million per annum to have their racquets in her hands: that’s twice what Wilson pay Serena Williams.
All of those sponsorship deals bring in around $23 million a year in off-court earnings. By comparison, Williams “only” pulls in about $12 million from extra-curricular activities.
So, who has more money in the bank? Estimates place Serena Williams’ net worth at around $145 million. Not too shabby, but not as much as Maria Sharapova’s estimated $195 million.
Click on the links below to read a full breakdown of each player’s net worth, earnings and spending habits: