Sports personalities get paid unimaginably high salaries. People like to moan about footballers being overpaid but boxers’ paydays can be absolutely huge.
Heavyweight Anthony Joshua, 28, is set to make £15 million ($19,692,675) regardless of how he performs against Carlos Takam in Cardiff.
Just to put that in context, it would take the average Brit 543 years and four months to earn £15 million.
That’s 1,045,501 hours and 38 minutes.
The maximum time it will take Joshua to earn the same money is 12 three-minute rounds.
That means that Anthony Joshua will earn £15 million in 36 minutes – no matter how well he does.
That’s £1,250,000 ($1,641,056) per round.
If you scale that up he’s earning a quarter of a billion pounds ($328,211,250) an hour.
Which is £416,667 ($547,019) a minute. Every minute he’s earning the same as 16 average UK citizens earn in a whole year – before tax.
And that’s not all, it’s actually much more impressive than that because the chances of this fight going the distance is considered quite slim.
That’s because Joshua has ended all 19 of his profession fights early by knock out or TKO.
Anthony Joshua is predicted to stop 35-3 Carlos Takam in the second round. Which seems a safe bet as eight of Joshua’s 19 fights have ended in the second.
Joshua has never gone 12 rounds. In April Wladimir Klitschko took Joshua to the 11th round before AJ knocked Klitschko down twice and the referee ended the bout as Klitschko struggled under a barrage of punches against the ropes.
In case you need convincing of Joshua’s punching power check him out here:
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Obviously if Joshua does fight just two rounds in Cardiff against Takam then his payday becomes even more impressive.
Fifteen million pounds in six minutes would put him on an eye-watering £150,000,000 ($196,926,750) an hour. Which translates into a very tasty £2.5 million a minute.
While these numbers might seem completely crazy, you have to take into account that Joshua trains all year to stay in peak physical condition for these fights.
The money is also based on the pay-per-view sales of the fight on Sky – so it is the broadcaster who has calculated what the boxer is worth to the fans – and advertisers.
That said, this is Joshua’s second £15 million payday of the year. Against Wladimir Klitschko in April Anthony Joshua evenly split the £30 million ($39,385,350) pot.
So if we look at that April payday and this one combined we can work out Anthony Joshua’s hourly rate for 2017.
Let’s assume that a boxer trains like the rest of us flip burgers and does 40-hours a week in the gym or similar.
I’ll be generous and give him the 28 days holiday entitlement and the 7 bank holiday days we get here in the UK.
That give’s Joshua 1,816 working hours in 2017. With his two £15 million pay days that puts him on a very healthy £16,520 ($21,688) an hour.
And that doesn’t even take into account any sponsorship deals or paid events.
Not to mention the fact that being Anthony Joshua means you’ll get a whole load of stuff for free as companies fall over themselves to be associated with your unstoppable form – so you’ll get to keep even more of that money than the rest of us would.
That said, being a boxer of Joshua’s calibre and ability isn’t really a 40-hour a week deal. Technically every waking hour is dedicated to staying in form, uninjured and at peak physical health.
If he’s taking his career seriously, which his wins certainly seem to suggest he is then almost everything he eats and everything he does will be designed around those six minutes in the ring.
However, even if we calculate Joshua’s hourly wage for each of the 8,760 hours in 2017 he still ends up on an incredible £3,425 an hour.
That means every time Anthony Joshua gets a full eight hours sleep he earns almost exactly what the average Brit earns in a whole year.
Absolutely incredible.
Having seen Anthony Joshua‘s form and somewhat intimidating size and strength I’m certainly not going to take it up with him.
Besides whenever he’s been interviewed he seems like a genuinely lovely chap so you can’t really begrudge him reaching the pinnacle of sporting achievement and the subsequent financial rewards.
