Two weeks ago, baseball sensation Juan Soto etched his name in history in a way which certainly made lots of people happy. His family, for one, and the New York Mets. Oh, and his home country of the Dominican Republic.

Soto signed with the Queens-based Mets for a record-shattering $765M contract, the largest professional sports contract of all time. To give you an idea, this 26-year old’s grandparents likely lived through a time where the Dominican Republic’s total economy was smaller than that contract figure.

Scatter plot comparing the contract value and length of the top 15 sports contracts, showing that Latin American athletes have 5 of the top 15 contracts.
5 of the top 15 sports contracts hail from LatAm

Puerto Rico’s own Francisco Lindor, the so-called “Mr. Smile,” signed a $341M decade-long contract of his own with the blue and orange back in 2022, a smidge higher than Soto’s compatriot Fernando Tatís Jr., nicknamed Bebo, got out of the San Diego Padres on the West Coast just a year before.

Granted, these men are locking in for decade-long, even fifteen-year contracts, which can be the norm in baseball. Outside of the sport, though, you better believe Latin Americans are still securing the bag.

In 2018, Mexican boxer Canelo Álvarez signed an eleven-fight $365M deal with British streaming service DAZN, before ending the arrangement in 2020 over disputes regarding his opponents.

But without a doubt, to really see big purse strings each year you’d have to look to the world’s most popular sport.

Bar chart comparing the top 10 largest sports salaries in history per year, with soccer players dominating the highest earnings | Sources: Wikipedia, Latinometrics
Top 10 largest sports salaries in history per year

Soccer – or as one famous Brazilian once termed it, The Beautiful Game – has seen its modern stars net some massive annual checks, and few know this better than Argentina’s own chosen son, Lionel Messi, who famously resigned with legendary Spanish club FC Barcelona in 2017 for $168M a year.

Notably, two of Messi’s contemporaries – Karim Benzema and Cristiano Ronaldo – signed for larger annual amounts in 2023 when they joined Saudi teams. But our region’s greatest contemporary player rejected a similar destiny that same year when he turned down a reportedly $1B offer (by far the largest in human history) to instead move to Miami and fulfill his family’s dreams.

Nothing more Latino than that, after all.