Yep, as you might have suspected, being a footballer at one of the biggest clubs in the Premier League is nice work if you can get it alright.
Five Premier League teams – Manchester City, Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool – all feature on a graph with mouth-watering figures that will make the average sports fan wish that they tried a little harder to pursue their dreams back when they were young aspiring sports stars.
The Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2014, compiled by the ever-excellent Sporting Intelligence in association with ESPN’s The Magazine and published this week to coincide with The Magazine’s Money Issue, lists the top 20 best-paying sports teams worldwide over the past five years.
Barcelona were the highest earning sports team over that five-year period with average player earnings of €37.975 million (approximately €27.5 million) per annum in that time, peaking in 2012, when the average Barcelona player earned a whopping $8.68 million €6.29 million) for a year’s work.
Manchester City, who are fourth on the overall list, lead the way in 2014 with their players set to earn an average of $8.11 million (€5.87 million) this year, more than the likes of baseball sides New York Yankees and the LA Dodgers, NBA outfit Brooklyn Nets and fellow European giants such as Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
Chelsea (5th), Manchester United (8th), Arsenal (14th) and Liverpool (17th) all feature prominently on the list of the highest-paying teams in the last five years and perhaps the most startling figure from that graph is the 265% difference in annual pay for Manchester City in 2014 as opposed to 2010.
The various figures make for very interesting reading and you can read more about the salary survey here, while if you’re not already doing so, you should check out the excellent Sporting Intelligence website and give him a follow on Twitter.
