It might be surprising to some people that badminton players can make quite a bit of money. While badminton may not be as lucrative as some other sports like basketball or soccer, top badminton players still have net worths in the tens of millions.
Badminton players create wealth in several ways – such as through sponsors/funding, prize money, advertisements, and their own businesses. In this post, we will be focusing on just prize money since all of the other categories don’t have publicly available information for us to look up.
What we did was look at the top 2 players/teams in each badminton discipline and calculated how much prize money they earned in 2019. We have a summary below of all the players/teams sorted by most prize money and then we broke down how they made the money in the sections below.
Wow, that’s a lot of money! Kento Momota leads the charge with $531,125 in tournament winnings. You can also think of the prize money as a rough indication of how dominant the players are in their respective disciplines. For example, Kento Momota is very dominant in men’s singles while Tai Tzu Ying is less dominant in women’s singles as shown by the prize money difference.
Keep in mind that all of this data is pre-tax money and that the prize money split is the same between the two different singles disciplines and is also the same between the three doubles categories. The doubles categories has a larger pot than the singles’ pots but will have to be split any prize money between two players.
If you would like to see how prize money is broken down, take a look at BWF’s official document here. And below, we have a table indicating the level of the tournaments. Lastly, also keep in mind that not all tournaments have prize money, such as the BWF World Championships, but is extremely prestigious. We wrote all about the most prestigious tournaments that players all over the world want to win in What are the Most Prestigious Badminton Tournaments?
Men’s Singles Rank 1: Kento Momota
Women’s Singles Rank 1: Tai Tzu Ying
Men’s Doubles Rank 1: Marcus Fernaldi Gideon/Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo
Women’s Doubles Rank 1: Chen Qing Chen/Jia Yi Fan
Mixed Doubles Rank 1: Zheng Si Wei/Huang Ya Qiong
Men’s Singles Rank 2: Chou Tien Chen
Women’s Singles Rank 2: Chen Yufei
Men’s Doubles Rank 2: Hendra Setiawan/Mohammad Ahsan
Women’s Doubles Rank 2: Yuki Fukushima/Sayaka Hirota
Mixed Doubles Rank 2: Wang Yi Lyu/Huang Dong Ping
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This is quite interesting to find. How did you collect information for players and their winnings? Do you look for this using script or browse then copy-paste? All the best.