Nominal vs present value
Local display: $0.5m · Rebased to 2024 USD via US CPI-U
How the total breaks down
MCG testimonial gate & member proceeds. Receipts from the Bradman's XI vs Hassett's XI match, where he scored his 117th and final first-class century.
Other state cricket association contributions. Additional donations forwarded from associations outside Victoria to the testimonial fund.
Impact 78
- Received cricket's largest documented individual payday of the amateur era
- Showed even the sport's greatest player earned almost nothing from playing itself
- Set the low bar every later commercial revolution in cricket was measured against
Bradman's testimonial, generous by the standards of 1948, still restates to well under a million 2024 dollars — a stark contrast with even a modest modern IPL contract. That gap is the clearest evidence of how completely broadcast rights and franchise cricket rewired the sport's economics; the greatest batting average in the sport's history was never, in his own playing days, translated into anything resembling wealth.
Bradman retired from Test cricket in 1948 with an average of 99.94, still the sport's most famous statistic, and returned to Australia to a testimonial match at the MCG that drew more than 53,000 spectators and raised £9,342 in his honor — he scored his 117th and last century in the game. It remains one of the best-documented individual paydays of cricket's amateur era, and by any modern conversion it is a strikingly small sum for the game's greatest player, a reminder of how little the sport paid before television money arrived.