Nominal vs present value
Local display: $29.6m · Rebased to 2024 USD via US CPI-U
How the total breaks down
Salary, match fees & IPL contract. Included his Mumbai Indians IPL salary in his final season before retiring from the format.
Endorsements. Around 15 brands including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Toshiba and Audemars Piguet at his commercial peak.
Impact 96
- Became the first cricketer to consistently rank among the world's top-earning athletes
- Proved a batsman's brand value could outlast his most productive playing years
- Opened the door for Forbes and other rankings to track Indian cricket pay seriously
Tendulkar's endorsement income, still climbing even as his playing output slowed in his late 30s, showed Indian advertisers that a cricket icon's shelf life ran years beyond his statistical peak. That realization reshaped how brands signed young Indian cricketers afterward — locking in long personal-services deals well before a player's best seasons, betting on the Tendulkar pattern repeating.
By 2013, his final year of ODI and IPL cricket, Tendulkar earned $22 million by Forbes' count — just $4 million of it from playing, the rest from roughly fifteen brand partnerships built over two decades of national-icon status. It ranked him 51st on Forbes' global athletes list, ahead of NBA and baseball stars, and confirmed what Indian advertisers had believed for years: no cricketer's commercial value had ever approached his, on the field or off it.