Going through a divorce is never a pleasant experience, but even more so for the mega-rich who have so much more to lose than the average couple. From luxury mansions, flashy sports cars and sharing out the wealth, breaking up with your spouse when you’re in the limelight is a costly business, especially if things get messy.
In the world of sport, there have been many high-profile uncouplings from Mike Tyson to Tiger Woods. But which sporting stars have paid out the most to their former spouse?
We’ve ranked the top 30 most expensive divorce settlements in sports for pro-athletes and owners alike, and the amounts are staggering!
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The 90-year-old F1 Supremo makes the top of our list, paying out an estimated $1.2 billion to his second wife Slavica Radić after 23 years together. Despite ongoing family drama, it seems the split between these two was amicable, both looking to move on with their lives….one now considerably richer than when they started out.
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The Russian oligarch and President of Monaco AC suffered the second biggest hit when he had to pay out $604 million to his then-wife Elena Rybolovleva. Her reasons for the split are on the grounds of serial infidelity of her husband. However, when you’re estimated to be worth $6.6 billion, this settlement amount is no real scratch off your shoulder.
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Before becoming one of the most well-known owners in UK football history, the prominent Chelsea FC owner married the former Russian Aeroflot stewardess Irina Vyacheslavovna Malandina. After 16 years and five children together, Irina filed for divorce when news surfaced of a romance between Roman and 25-year-old Daria Zhukova which led to Daria giving birth to Roman’s sixth child. Through the settlement, Irina walked away with an impressive $300 million.
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Brooke Shields, the former wife of tennis ace Andre Agassi, walks away with the highest settlement amount per month of marriage with almost $8.5 million made in just the 2 short years the couple were together. Despite their short stint as a couple back in the late 1990’s, it was reported at the time that they would ‘remain the best of friends’, whether that’s true to this day, who knows but it’s not like she didn’t get anything from the sports star.
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When you have the most expensive divorce in sports history, it is no surprise that Bernie Ecclestone and Slavica Radić should end up on our second list. Even though their marriage was considerably longer than our other top two contenders, sporting a marriage that was 23 years long, when you have a settlement amount worth $1.2 billion, the numbers soon rack up over the months.
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By no means the most expensive settlement on our list but probably one of the most well-known splits comes between Mike Tyson and Robin Givens. Givens received extreme media backlash after conducting a revealing interview about the 8-month marriage with Barbara Walters on ABC. Despite this though, Givens made $2,620,141 in such a short amount of time it may have been worth the backlash.
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In the wider world of celebrity break ups, dishing out billions of dollars during a divorce isn’t unheard of, as we will see from our top 3 most expensive celebrity divorces. So whether you’re an actor, singer or esteemed businessman, there's no getting away from paying the big bucks when you break up with your spouse, just showing the importance of having a prenuptial agreement in place.
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Yes you read that right. $35 billion for a divorce settlement between the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos and his former wife MacKenzie Scott. The founder of online retail giant Amazon split with his then wife after 26 years of marriage. When you’re the world's richest man however, this amount is probably nothing more than a few days work, if that.
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Renowned art dealer Alec Wildenstein parted with such a huge sum of his wealth in 1999 when he divorced socialite Jocelyn Wildenstein. After a messy divorce that was covered publically in the press, Jocelyn walked away with $3.8 billion but told she was not allowed to use it on any more cosmetic surgery, something she is famous for.
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Another of the world’s super-rich and one of the most influential men in the world due to the ownership of a number of the worlds newspapers and TV channels, Rupert Murdoch parted with $1.7 billion when he split from Anna Maria Torv back in 1999.
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We conducted research into the most expensive divorces in history, dividing the data to focus specifically on athletes and owners of sporting establishments or celebrities in general. For each sporting personality or celebrity, we sourced the reported divorce settlement amount using a variety of sources, which you can view here.
For each couple, we also then calculated how much the divorce settlement would be worth in 2020 financial terms using this US Inflation Calculator.
