LeBron James isn’t the most popular athlete in the world, but he’s close. ESPN released its annual list of the 100 most popular athletes on the planet on Tuesday, with Cristiano Ronaldo nabbing the top spot again. James, the top NBA player on the list, was second yet again.
Other NBA players included two Golden State Warriors—Kevin Durant at No. 8 and Stephen Curry at No. 11. There are 13 NBA players in the top 100. Here’s the full list of NBA players:
2) LeBron James
8) Kevin Durant
11) Stephen Curry
24) Dwyane Wade
28) James Harden
35) Russell Westbrook
41) Carmelo Anthony
51) Chris Paul
61) Damian Lillard
63) Blake Griffin
65) Dwight Howard
The list is made using the Forbes wealthiest athletes list, then a number of other factors including social media and other international media and web searches of specific athletes.
The data for each athlete in the pool was then fed into a formula created by ESPN director of sports analytics Ben Alamar that weighs athletes’ endorsements, their following on the social media Big Three (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) and Google search popularity, producing a comparative ranking system. The analysis includes five categories: endorsement money, Twitter followers, Instagram followers, Facebook followers and Google Trends score. For special situations (esports and China) we used two additional categories: other social media — for when the athlete was more relevant on a platform outside the Big Three (Twitch, for example, although no gamers made the top 100) — and, in China’s case, Baidu search score, because Google is blocked there.
That might explain a number of omissions or odd placements on the list. For one, the Hockey Internet was upset there wasn’t a single hockey player on the list and just one Canadian: Genie Bouchard, a tennis player listed as No. 93.
I’m personally kind of surprised Kyrie Irving is ahead of Westbrook after the season he just had, but it’s all pretty arbitrary anyway. It will be tough for James to ever overcome one of soccer’s best living players, but we’ll see what happens next year.
