Since bursting on the scene as a 15-year-old wonderkid at Wimbledon, Coco Gauff has established herself as one of the best tennis players in the world – and a strong earner, too. The American has won 34 of her last 38 matches after suffering a first-round exit at the 2023 Championships at the All-England Club.

Seven of these contests came at the US Open when she claimed the first Grand Slam of her career in September. The teenager ended the 2023 season at a career-high ranking of No. 3, and she is set to compete in her very first Australian Open semi-final this week. The tennis star also ended the year as the third highest-paid female athlete, according to Forbes.

Gauff’s net worth is £17.1 million thanks to her £5.2 million career prize money and $11.8 million in endorsements with companies such as New Balance, her racket manufacturer Head, Rolex and UPS. She even has her own shoe with New Balance called the Coco CG1, which hit the shelves in 2022.

Gauff became one of the few tennis players and one of a select few stars in all of women’s sports to design a shoe of her own. With plenty of her career and life ahead, Gauff is interested in investing some of her money into more business projects in the future but is unsure what that will look like. “I mean, I really do love fashion,” Gauff said. “I love make-up. I love that type of thing. I just haven’t really thought about how I would build that into a brand, per se.”

Follow us on X for the best and latest in sports news

Gauff is not someone who spends much of her hard-earned money and is happy to save it and not use it unnecessarily. “I don’t like to spend money,” she said on the Tennis.com podcast. “When I had my first grand slam check, I wanted a car but my dad had already bought it and I don’t know what to buy now.”

She added on an Instagram Live after winning the US Open: “There’s nothing crazy materialistic that I really want. I’m very satisfied with all that I have. I don’t want anything crazy.” Gauff has enjoyed a stellar start to her tennis career both on and off the court, but she almost gave up on her dream.

When she was 16, she encountered difficulties dealing with early success and added expectations. This sucked some of the love and passion out of the sport for Gauff, which she elaborated on in a candid post for the tennis series “Behind the Racquet.” “Throughout my life, I was always the youngest to do things, which added hype that I didn’t want,” she said.

“It added this pressure that I needed to do well fast. Once I let that all go, that’s when I started to have the results I wanted. Going back to around 2017-18, I was struggling to figure out if this was really what I wanted. I always had the results, so that wasn’t the issue. I just found myself not enjoying what I loved.

“I realized I needed to start playing for myself and not other people. For about a year I was really depressed. That was the toughest year for me so far.”

Her father Corey was quick to play down the notion that his daughter may have been depressed and provided more context to the situation. He said: “She was never clinically depressed, never diagnosed with depression, never seen anybody about depression. There’s no medicine going on. This is a kid’s personal pressure that they put on themselves and how they deal with it and how they mature.”