Manchester United have been revealed to have the largest wage bill in the world, followed by Barcelona and Manchester City.
The Global Sports Salary Survey (GSSS) conducted a survey that revealed that the first team squad at Manchester United earn a £5.77 million a year basic salary on average.
According to the Daily Mail, The survey takes into account the pay of almost 10,000 sportsmen from 333 teams in seven sports across 17 of the world’s richest leagues.
It found that the average first-team wage at Old Trafford equates to basic pay of £110,962 per-week. The summer additions of world-record signing Paul Pogba and Zlatan Ibrahimovic have inflated their wage bill, rocketing them up the list.
And United are now the fourth best-paid team in world sport and the best-paid football team in the world.
Barcelona are second in football, with an average of £5.6m per player a year, or £109,000 a week. Manchester City are third, with an average of £5.4m per player er year, which equates to £104,000 a week. Real Madrid are surprisingly ranked fourth on the list. The 3 teams are ranked fifth, ninth and nineteenth across all sports respectively.
The rest of the ‘Big 6’ in English football have wage bills and ranks as follows :
5) Chelsea : £4.51m
9) Arsenal : £3.70m
10) Liverpool : £3.01m
12) Tottenham : £2.68m
According to the results of the survey, the English Premier League is by far the highest-paid league in football, which comes as no surprise, given the massive fees clubs receive from Broadcast deals.
Wages are by far the biggest drain on a Premier League Club’s finances, but the increased sponsorship and broadcast agreements mean that Premier League clubs spent a staggering, record-breaking £1.2bn this summer.
It should come as no surprise that Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Gareth Bale are the three highest earning football players in the world.
What is more surprising is that Paul Pogba now earns more than both Wayne Rooney and Zlatan Ibrahimovic, with a reported weekly wage of £290k a week, as compared to Rooney’s £260k and Ibrahimovic’s £250k.
It is no surprise that more and more players are heading to China either, with three players from the Chinese League making up the top 10 list of highest paid footballers, with Hulk, Graziano Pelle and Ezequiel Lavezzi coming in at 4th, 6th and 7th on the list.
The numbers get more staggering every year, and there is no sign of it slowing down with the average pay in the Premier League multiplying by almost 32 times in 25 seasons, from £77,000 in 1992-93 to £2.4m now.
With the kind of money that keeps pouring into football, we will no doubt see these figures continue to grow every year.
