Ryan Garcia hasn’t accomplished much in the ring but he certainly has our attention.
SportsPro, a sports industry website, has ranked the 22-year-old lightweight contender No. 12 on its list of The World 50 Most Marketable Athletes – higher than any other boxer.
Anthony Joshua was ranked No. 31 and Tyson Fury was No. 32. Only three boxers made the list.
Garcia (20-0, 17 KOs) has a tremendous following on social media even though he has not beaten a single big-name opponent in his young career. He has 7.3 million followers on Instagram, for example.
SportsPro used something called Nielsen’s athlete marketability methodology. He had an Athlete Influencer Score of 97 overall. In sub-categories, his Reach was 26, Relevance 17, Resonance 29 and Return 24.
By comparison, Joshua and Fury had AIS scores of 76 and 75, respectively.
Garcia wasn’t the top combat sports athlete on the list. UFC star Khabib Nurmagomedov was ranked No. 7. Nos. 1-5 on the list: Lionel Messi (soccer), Cristiano Ronaldo (soccer), Lebron James (basketball), Virat Kohli (cricket) and Bianca Andreescu (tennis).
SportsPro explained on its website the criteria used in the rankings: “Designed to accurately monitor social campaign effectiveness, the framework incorporates a range of performance and sponsorship-related KPIs, such as social following, content engagement, fanbase growth over time, media value, and the performance of branded versus organic content. For this list, the Instagram accounts for over 6,000 athletes from 21 sports were tracked over the last 12 months.”
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