The Business Of Sumo

Although baseball is, to many people, as American as apple pie and fireworks on the Fourth of July, Japan has made a name for itself in the game, thanks, in part, to legends such as Sadaharu Oh. But the Japanese furor for baseball is superseded by the Pacific island nation’s love for its own creation, sumo wrestling.

This sport, in which extremely large men grapple with each other inside a ring, is part of a deep-rooted tradition in Japan. It’s also a huge business worth millions of yen to the wrestlers and those who train them.

Here, we’ll take a look at how the sport is organized, how much money sumo wrestlers are making, and what corporate sponsors are contributing.

Organization

The governing body of professional sumo wrestling is the Japan Sumo Association, also known as Nihon Sumo Kyokai. Wrestlers of other nationalities are welcome to compete, but professional competitions only take place in Japan.

Association members are former wrestlers and, as such, are the only people allowed to train new wrestlers. All wrestlers are part of a training stable; there are 54 stables in Sumo, for a total of nearly 700 wrestlers. The association provides stables with approximately $550 in monthly training payments for each wrestler who’s not in one of the top two divisions.

There’s plenty of incentive for masters to recruit and train winners: For sumo stables, the cash cows are yokozuna -- or grand champions -- who are worth about $3,000 every two months. Larger stables may receive total payouts that approach $1 million annually.

Sponsors

Big business provides the money that fuels the economies of many sports, and this fact certainly holds true in sumo. Many Japanese corporations sponsor individual top-division matches and contribute nearly $500. The wrestlers get around $250 per sponsor, with the tax man getting whatever is left over.

JCB -- a major player in the Japanese credit card industry with about 56 million card members, 13 million merchants and annual sales of about $56.5 billion -- is a cosponsor of Nihon Sumo Kyokai.

Ticket sales

Japanese Grand Sumo has six tournaments a year that run 15 days each. Three of these tournaments take place at the Sumo Hall in Tokyo, while the others are held in Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka.

In November 2006, the Japan Sumo Association held its tournament in Fukuoka where ringside and A-level box seats were listed as sold out for the last four days of the event. Ringside seats sold for about $120 each and a two-person, A-level box sold for more than $190. Arena seats were a relative bargain, selling for about $26 a piece.

Charges of corruption

With so much money involved, especially for the guys at the top of the sport, it may not surprise you that some people thought everything wasn’t on the up and up.

In 2000, a study on corruption and bout fixing looked at wrestlers who had 7-7 records going into the final day of a tournament. What had drawn suspicion was that about 70% of these heavyweights with .500 records won. However, the study did not find any solid evidence that corruption was taking place. In fact, in a 2006 tournament, six of the seven wrestlers with 7-7 marks lost on the final day and the lone winner gained his victory by default.