RookieStar wrote:Wait.. Franz is the highest paid athletenin yor country in ALL sports? Like race car, tennis, hand ball etc?
You would think that seeing your countryman earning 270m in 5 years a lot of athletes or fans would splinter to that sport.
Remember that Franz Wagner gets paid by the Magic who have so much money to spend due to broadcasting rights which are mainly paid by US customers (and then by many more viewers all over the world with only a fraction of them Germans).
It was a sidenote in German sports magazines that Wagner is the highest paid German athlete now. That doesn't mean that the average sports fan gets drawn away from association football to basketball as it's about the sport itself and not about the income of the athletes.
With sportswashing going on a German golf player could theoretically earn more than Wagner on that articifial Saudi golf tour, and still noone would care about watching golf as it will still remain a fringe sport in comparison to football.
In Germany football ranks above everything else, with even the 2nd Bundesliga drawing a lot more fans than other sports. In winter nordic and alpine skiing is shown a lot (mostly due to the winter break of the Bundesliga and European football cups), motor sports (F1) is popular, and some track and field. Other sports only will be watched by a lot of people when it's a major tournament like now with the EuroBasket 2025. It's the same with ice hockey (Leon Draisaitl became the first German MVP in the NHL, and still noone cares about that league. Germans will watch an ice hockey world cup and some Olympic games, but that's it) which is much less popular than handball which might be the 2nd most popular team sports in Germany.
Don't underestimate the time difference. Sports is best watched (and discussed) with pals, but very few people can actually afford to watch games in the middle of the night. So American leagues aren't really watched that much.
I guess that Wagner could stroll through German streets and most people would be in awe because of his height, but they would not recognize him. Schröder might be a bit more recognizable as the star of the current national team, but up to this point Nowitzki remains the only German basketball player to really transcend beyond the sport in Germany. And even he is way less popular than the biggest association football stars or the most successful athletes of the pre-internet era when audiences weren't that fractured as they are now. As -Luke- said: Beckenbauer had always been present as an active player, then coach and pundit. In the 80s everyone was watching Becker and Graf, in the 90s Michael Schumacher dominated with millions watching, but with so many others means of watching entertainment now football is the only true mass event left that is watched by millions at the same time.