Robert Moreno described on the ‘Offsiders’ podcast a situation that looks beyond the financial showcase of professional football. After Luis Enrique’s spell at Roma, Moreno recalled that his first “decent” salaries came at the Italian club and that, when the coaching staff was left waiting for a new offer, the pause began to have a direct impact on his family finances: “I had enough money until September to pay the mortgage.”

The episode is significant because it did not happen in a peripheral sport, but in the ecosystem most closely associated with money. For an established head coach, stopping, waiting for an offer or turning down a project can be part of career management; for part of his coaching staff, that same pause can become a break in employment. The difference lies not only in sporting level, but in the economic position each professional occupies within the structure.

The second line of high-performance sport

Elite sport does not operate as a single economic category. Within the same environment, stars with multimillion-dollar contracts coexist with head coaches who can choose their next step, assistants on regulated salaries, analysts tied to specific projects, strength and conditioning coaches, physiotherapists, return-to-play specialists, federation technicians and personal coaches dependent on grants, results or selection processes. Seen from the inside, the elite has very marked labour hierarchies.

The Liga ACB offers a clear example of that internal difference. Documentation from the Spanish Basketball Coaches Association -AEEB- listed a reference minimum salary of 36,000 euros for the first assistant and 32,000 euros for the remaining assistants: figures that show a regulated structure, but not a level of economic security comparable to the public image of professional sport. With a family, a mortgage and a career shaped by the continuity of a sporting project, those amounts do not leave much room to take on a year without a contract.

Personal coaches and specialists far from the spotlight

Gymnastics helps illustrate the gap between technical prestige and the labour market. Cecile Canqueteau-Landi, a coach linked to Simone Biles and appointed co-head coach of Georgia Gymnastics, moved to an annual salary of 340,000 dollars, while Ryan Roberts was set at 265,000 dollars. Those are high figures for college gymnastics, but they are relevant precisely because they are exceptional: they come from a coach associated with one of the most dominant figures in the history of her sport and from an NCAA structure, not from a general standard. USA Gymnastics itself places pay for experienced full-time coaches between 30,000 and 80,000 dollars, with entry-level rates of 10 to 20 dollars per hour.

The same logic appears in other Olympic disciplines. In the United Kingdom, athletics coaches linked to medallists from Paris 2024 faced funding cuts of up to 60%, with stipends that could fall from 40,000 to 15,000 pounds a year, despite the British team winning ten medals at the Games. In Ireland, the Irish Judo Association published a part-time National High-Performance Coach vacancy to work on the 2028 Olympic programme, the International Judo Federation -IJF- circuit, European and world championships, Olympic qualification and international training camps, with an annual salary of 25,000 euros dependent on the continuation of Sport Ireland funding.

Grants, support programmes and federative structures in the Olympic cycle

In other markets, even positions linked to international performance operate on scales far removed from the major contracts of commercial sport. Stanford University published an assistant Olympics sports performance coach vacancy with an expected annual range of 65,000 to 70,000 dollars, while in US college swimming, ‘SwimSwam’ reported a base salary of 120,000 dollars for Erik Posegay as associate head coach at the University of Texas, one of the best-paid assistant positions in the country in his discipline. In Canada, the federal sport support programme generally limits public contributions for coaching positions to 115,000 Canadian dollars for full-time roles, with a maximum of 150,000 for profiles recommended by Own the Podium.

Spanish Paralympic sport shows clearly how part of high performance is sustained through grants, services and institutional programmes, rather than ordinary salaries. The Plan ADOP includes financial support for athletes, support athletes and coaches, as well as direct aid programmes for federations, generational renewal and social outreach. In 2026, the Spanish Paralympic Committee -CPE- set support for coaches at between 300 and 1,150 euros per month, within a programme that will include 191 athlete and technical beneficiaries.