from Sachin Dave Chandan of ESPN,

For ESPN The Magazine's third annual World Fame 100 issue, we calculated the most famous athletes in sports. For the second year in a row, no hockey players cracked the top 100.

Here's why. First off, to create the list, we started with more than 600 of the biggest names in sports, drawn from 68 countries, then had ESPN's director of analytics, Ben Alamar, rank them based on a formula that took into account three fame factors: endorsement dollars; Google Trend score, which measures how often a name is searched, using Cristiano Ronaldo's score of 100 as a baseline (the higher the better); and social media following. (Since not all athletes are on every platform, we used only the number from their most popular account.)

Remember, this is a global ranking of fame. While hockey is an international sport, other sports have a much larger worldwide footprint. Thus, the most players on the World Fame 100 -- including No. 1, Ronaldo -- come from soccer, the biggest game in the world. Even though the NHL is the most popular league in Canada, that country's population is miniscule compared with, say, India (more than 1.3 billion) -- which helps explain why 10 cricket players from the Indian Premier League, which has a viewership of 316 million, made the top 100, while no NHL or Major League Baseball players did.

The two highest-ranked hockey players on the full list were who most people would suspect, but No. 3 was a bit of a surprise:

continued (Ovechkin at #133, Crosby at #157 and Kovalchuk at #193...