How Product Endorsement Contracts Are So Important To Professional Athletes

Not all professional athletes make millions of dollars like those that participate in less traditional non revenue accumulating sports. In order to be able to be a professional athlete full time, many of these less popular athletes have to count on the products and money they get from their sponsors and advertisers. Other athletes, that are in the limelight however, make a lot of money playing their sport and sometimes more from their sponsorship contracts. One of the first athletes to really do this was NBA player, Michael Jordan who used his basketball skills to promote many products as well as apparel, toys, items and even basketball videos with his likeness on them.

Wherever there is space to promote a sponsorship company, they will find a way to do it whether it is on the helmet of a race car driver or in the form of a body tattoo to professional beach volleyball players like Gabrielle Reece. Athletes are offered great package deals to promote a certain brand as a kind of spokesperson and in exchange they receive compensated with paychecks and products. For the lesser known athletes, this is extremely helpful to offer them the needed income to be able to work out and compete full time. For other well paid athletes like professional baseball, basketball and football players it is just icing on the cake.

Michael Jordan was one of the first professional athletes to really be endorsed by various sponsors and he ended up making more from those endorsements than he did playing basketball. Certain businesses saw the total star power in Michael Jordan and knew he could make their product be noticed with him promoting it. One example was Gatorade which was a sports drink that had existed for some time but when they got Michael Jordan to endorse Gatorade, sales rose quickly and it became the best selling sports drink.

Now younger professional athletes that are making it to the big leagues see product endorsements as part of the entire deal when they sign professionally. A lot of new athletes that are confident in their sport and their ability to sell items even hold out for multi million dollars contracts today. One example of that younger big time player is Le Bron James. He was in the headlines for his basketball abilities saying he was the next Jordan when he was just a sophomore playing in Akron, Ohio. Now he is one the biggest paid athletes with multiple endorsements.

The biggest grossing professional athlete to have the greatest amount of endorsement deals ever is PGA professional, Tiger Woods. As an individual athlete, he is not paid by salary but rather by performance and the number of large golf tournaments he wins. Because he has been such a powerful and likeable force in his sport, his endorsements deals are earning him many million every year on top of his golf earnings. He also has recently lost many of these sponsors with the recent scandals of his many infidelities.