Sabalenka Didn't Win a Slam This Year. She's Still the Most Marketable Athlete in the World.

Aryna Sabalenka hasn't won a title since March. She lost two Grand Slam finals to Elena Rybakina this year, and she lost her world No. 1 ranking to her as well. This week, SportsPro named her the most marketable athlete in the world, making her the fourth woman and the third tennis player to top its annual list since it began in 2010, after Naomi Osaka and Genie Bouchard.

How the Ranking Works

It isn't a results table. SportsPro scores athletes out of 100 across three pillars, with brand equity worth 45 points, momentum worth 40 and commercial trajectory worth 15. The model draws on 27 factors and more than 3,000 brand partnerships, and this year's edition started from a pool of 1,202 athletes across 70 sports, with 247 fully assessed. Sabalenka scored 80.95.

Read that way, her season makes more sense. She still won the Sunshine Double at Indian Wells and Miami, reached two major finals and won the Laureus Sportswoman of the Year award. She has also taken more control of her own media, including a behind-the-scenes docuseries on YouTube. None of that depends on lifting a Grand Slam trophy.

What It Says About the Gauff Benchmark

In August, writing about Alex Eala's Marriott Bonvoy deal, I used Coco Gauff as the benchmark. Forbes had her as the highest-paid female athlete in the world for three straight years, with $25 million of her earnings coming from endorsements, and I argued that the real lesson in her portfolio was breadth, close to 20 partners across categories, rather than the size of any single check.

This year's list complicates that picture. Gauff ranks 32nd, down from 10th last year, while Sabalenka climbed from 27th to first. That doesn't mean Gauff's commercial base has collapsed. Forbes measures money already earned, while SportsPro weighs momentum and trajectory almost as heavily as established brand equity, so a quieter year on court shows up in one ranking long before it shows up in the other.

Where That Leaves Eala

I also wrote in August that the brands paying eight-figure sums are paying for consistency at the deepest rounds of the biggest events, not a single breakout summer. Sabalenka's year backs that up. She didn't win a major, but she kept reaching their final weekends.

Eala isn't in this year's top 50. Tennis has eight players on the list, Sabalenka, Alcaraz, Zverev, Swiatek, Osaka, Gauff, Sinner and Djokovic, which shows how high the bar sits. But the way the model is built works in her favor. With 40 of the 100 points tied to momentum, a player whose rise is still building can climb quickly, the way Sabalenka did from 27th. Her home market is growing too, with Manila set to host two WTA events in 2027.

The Bigger Picture

Tennis has eight of the 50 places, behind only basketball with 13 and soccer with 11, and the sport's top name on the list is a WTA player again. For anyone weighing a merger of the tours' commercial businesses, that's a useful reminder that the ATP's bigger revenue isn't the only measure of who brings value to the table.

Eala, meanwhile, is into the quarterfinals at the Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo this week.

Jake Scudder

Journalist – topics of tennis