GLOBAL SPORTS SALARIESSURVEY 2019
AVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, TEAM-BY-TEAM,
IN THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SPORTS LEAGUES
350 TEAMS
18 LEAGUES
12 COUNTRIES
8 SPORTS
10,070 PLAYERS$22.6 BILLION IN WAGES
1 AIM

THE

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sportingintelligencesportingintelligence“It is not a coincidence that
Barcelona, Real Madrid
and Juventus, the world’s
top three wage payers, arealso among the top five mostpopular teams in any sport,
anywhere.”sportingintelligence

MESSI’S BARCELONAREMAIN NO1 IN WORLD PAY
Barcelona have retained theirstatus as the best paid team in
global sport. The average basic
first-team pay at the Spanish
giants - where genius Lionel Messi
has starred for 15 years andcounting - is £9,827,644 per year
for the current season, 2019-20,
according to research for this 10thedition of Sportingintelligence’s
Global Sports Salaries Survey(GSSS).
That number represents a slight
drop on last year’s table-topping
figure of £10.5m but keeps Barçain first place in professional teamsport, worldwide, ahead of theirbiggest domestic rivals. Real
Madrid have an average justabove £8.9m in second place
this year (the same ranking as lastyear) with Serie A giants Juventus
averaging almost £8.1m in third
place, up from ninth last year.
Basketball teams from North
America’s NBA fill out the rest of
the places in this year’s top 10.
The wage figures represent basic
annual pay and do not include
signing-on fees, loyalty bonuses,
performance add-ons or anyof the other remarkable extras
that can be part of contracts
nowadays.
Last year was the first time Barça
had been back at the top of theworld in pay terms since the GSSSof 2012, when their table-topping
figure was half the current
number. There is a detailed
explanation of our definitions and2 			methodology later.
To celebrate the 10th editionof this report, this 2019 GSSS
is a ‘Popularity Issue’ special,with features and data dives to
explore which teams and leagues
can objectively be considered
the most popular in the world.
Analysis in these pages willconsider metrics as diverse asattendance, the financial valueof non-domestic broadcast rights
sales, and cumulative social
media followings across the major
platforms.
It is not entirely a coincidence
that Barcelona, Real Madrid
and Juventus, the world’s top
three wage payers (by averagesalary) are also among the top
five most popular teams in any
sport, anywhere, measured bytheir popularity across Facebook,
Instagram and Twitter combined.
With Juventus taking third spot
this year, there is no podium
place for any NBA team. As
recently as 2017, the top threeteams in the GSSS were all NBA
teams: Oklahoma City Thunder,
Cleveland Cavaliers and GoldenState Warriors.
Last year’s No3 team, Oklahoma,
are down to No6 this year, withaverage basic pay of almost£7.55m. Above them at No4 andNo5 are NBA rivals Portland Trail
Blazers (just over £8m) and theWarriors (just over £7.9m). Last
year there were three NBA teams
breaking the average pay ceilingof $10m (US dollars) per man per

year. This year only Portland top
that sum using the exchange
rate applicable for this GSSS, with
£1 being worth $1.25. We use a
mid-year rate for all currencies,
detailed later.
All of the top dozen teams inthis year’s list are either from thethe ‘Big 5’ European footballleagues (Barcelona, Real Madrid
and Juventus at No1, No2 andNo3, and PSG at No12) or fromthe NBA. As recently as our 2017
report, Juventus were ranked
No32, leaping to No10 last year
not only because they signed
Messi’s nemesis and fellow
superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, butalso because of signing othercostly players. They have doubled
down on this strategy this season,
as we will detail later in thisintroduction.
Of the top 20 teams in this year’slist, 15 are from the NBA and fivefrom elite European football:Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus,
PSG and Manchester City (No13).
Of the teams ranked 21 to 30,
nine are from the NBA, with justone more from elite European
football, Bayern Munich of theBundesliga at No22. For the firsttime in a decade of this study,
there is no Major League Baseballteam in the top 30 places. The
inaugural survey had a baseballteam, the New York Yankees, at
No1, and they stayed inside the
top 10 until 2016, before plunging.

3

sportingintelligence
BARCELONA’S CONSISTENTSPENDING
An extraordinary combinationof renewed contracts andnew signings lifted Barcelona’s
average basic pay above £10m
in last year’s report from £6.6m theprevious season.
Foremost among those contracts
was the biggest pay deal inBarcelona’s history awarded
to Messi, widely regarded as
the best footballer of all time.
His gross basic (pre-tax) annual
Barça pay tops £50m per year,
including guaranteed image
rights fees. There are other‘one-off’ or variable elements
including signing-on fee, loyalty
payments, appearance money
and performance bonuses which
don’t come under our ‘basic pay’
definition (for any player in any
sport) and aren’t included in our
calculations.
When Barcelona formallyannounced Messi’s contract
extension, on 25 November 2017,
they confirmed the new deal
would run to the end of the 202021 season and that the contract
included a buyout clause of€700m (then £619m). ‘
It was just one among a stringof renewal deals for important
players between GSSS 2017 being
compiled and GSSS 2018; Gerard
Pique, Sergi Roberto, Samuel Umtiti
and Sergio Busquets all renewed inthat period while signings included
Philippe Coutinho, Arthur, Malcolm
and Arturo Vidal.
The bottom line, according to oursurvey research, was an averagebasic Barça annual salary inexcess of £10m a year for each of4 			

sportingintelligencethe 23 members of the first-teamsquad; those 23 players formallydeclared by Barcelona on theirwebsite as first-team players at our
cut-off point.
Now, a year later, Barcelona’s
official financial statements haveshown the first-team player wage
bill for football in 2018-19 (inclusiveof bonuses and benefits) was£312m. This indicates bonuses andbenefits of around 35 per cent per
player on top of their basic pay
last season.
Barcelona’s total wage bill in 201819, as a sports club generating
almost €1bn in revenues, was€532m (£475m), although that
included salaries to fund asignificant youth football set-up
as well as basketball, handball,
ice hockey and futsal teams, plus
management and staffing of‘other activities’ on and off thepitch / court / ice.
The reason for Barcelona’s
slight dip in average first-teampay is simply that the group of
outgoing players collectively
earned more than those counted
for GSSS purposes this year.
Philippe Coutinho isn’t counted
as a Barcelona player this year
because he’s on loan at Bayern
Munich, which is where his salaryresides for this report. Denis Suárez
has gone to Celta Vigo, Thomas
Vermaelen to Vissel Kobe, Munir
to Sevilla, and so on. And while
Barca’s two most significant ‘gets’of 2019 are not cheap in pay terms(Antoine Griezmann and Frenkie
de Jong), other additions havebeen of young and relatively low
paid players including Junior Firpo,
23, Moussa Wagué, 20, (promoted
in 2019 from Barcelona’s B team),and Jean-Clair Todibo, 19, whojoined in January.

RISERS AND FALLERS
While Barcelona and Real Madrid
haven’t moved from the No1 andNo2 spots they occupied last year,
other teams in this GSSS have been
rising and falling dramatically. The
biggest climbers anywhere on thisyear’s list in absolute terms are the
Buffalo Bills of the NFL, up 60 placesfrom No152 to No92, followed by
the Atlanta Braves of MLB (up 59
places from No123 to No64) andthen Rafa Benitez’s Dalian Yifangof China’s CSL, up 57 places from
No235 to No178.

“The NBA remains
comfortably the top paying
league as a whole in worldsport, with average basic
salaries of almost £6.7m
per man this season.”Four of the five biggest fallers
this year are MLB teams, with
the Toronto Blue Jays down 123
places to No172, the Baltimore
Orioles down 99 places to No157,
the Kansas City Royals down 84
places to No161, and the Arizona
Diamondbacks down 68 places
to No140. It has been speculated
that more MLB teams than everare trying to implement a “reboot”
system whereby they are as poor
as possible in a particular given
season in order to benefit from thebest draft picks the next season. To
those who have no idea how MLB
drafts work: the worst teams in any
given season get the first choice ofsigning the best upcoming talent
the next season.

NBA STRETCH LEAD AS
RICHEST LEAGUEThe NBA remains comfortably the
top paying league as a whole inworld sport, with average basic
salaries of almost £6.7m per man
this season. The details on how
many teams and players are
considered for each league arein the league-by-league analysis
pages, as are the average salaries
and median numbers.
5sportingintelligence
The Premier League remains thehighest paying football league
in the world, at nearly £3.2m
per player this season, up from£2.99m a year ago. The average
weekly pay in the Premier
League rose above £50,000 per
week for the first time in 2017-18
and is now above £60,000 per
week for the first time, or £61,024
per week to be precise.
In most leagues, money matterswhen it comes to performance;
the more you pay, the better you
do, all other things being equal.
That is particularly true in elitefootball leagues but also true in
the NBA and in MLB. The reason
is fairly straightforward - better
players cost more, and if you’re
spending more it’s generally
because you have better
players.
The 18 leagues and 350 teams
we consider in the main list startwith the ‘big four’ from American
sports, which are the NFL(gridiron, American football), theNBA (basketball), MLB (baseball)and NHL (ice hockey), continue
with the ‘big five’ footballleagues of Europe, which are
the English Premier League (EPL),
the Bundesliga of Germany, La
Liga of Spain, Serie A of Italy andLigue 1 of France, and include
the AFL (Aussie Rules) from
Australia, CFL football (gridiron)from Canada, NPB baseball fromJapan and IPL cricket from India.
Our final five leagues are
the Scottish Premiership from
Scotland, MLS from North
America, China’s CSL andJapan’s J-League - all as
examples of smaller-scale
leagues from the world’s mostpopular sport, football - andthe WNBA.
6 			

sportingintelligence
For the NBA, the NHL and the NFL,the numbers in this report pertain
to the 2019-20 seasons. For thePremier League, Bundesliga, La
Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and Scottish
Premiership, the salaries are forthe squads after the close of the2019 summer transfer window for
the 2019-20 seasons. For MLB, MLS,
IPL, NPB, CSL, J-League and the
WNBA the numbers are for 2019,and for the AFL and CFL theycome from the end of the 2018seasons.

including a possible landmark
season in the history of English
football. As Ian Herbert explains ina piece on pages 16-19, Premier
League crowds in 2019-20 are on
course to be the highest average
gates in top-flight English football,ever. In an age of footballsaturation, weariness at cynicalowners, asset-squeezing, rampant
agents’ greed and widely
perceived sky-high ticket prices,
record all-time crowds would beremarkable.

£1 = ¥137 (Japanese yen) and £1

THE POPULARITY ISSUE

On pages 20-25, we consider how
one might make an objective
assessment of which sports
league in the world is really themost popular. And in the 72page league-by-league analysis
sections, on pages 42-113, welook at how each team fares in
global popularity across the majorsocial media networks.

We mention this simply because,

Our hypothesis is that successleads to popularity, which is
generally true. Popularity canlead to greater wealth. But
in some leagues there is anenormous disparity between
popularity (and therefore wealth)from the ‘biggest’ to the ‘smallest’teams. And this can lead to adisparity in performance, andsuccess. We wondered whether
one glance at a graphic
depicting relative social media
popularity is all you need see
whether a league is ‘balanced’and ‘fair’, or not. Remarkably inmany leagues, it is.

headache-inducing but essential

Recent editions of this report haveeach been thematic specials.
The GSSS 2017 focussed on
gender inequality in global teamsport. We took an in-depth lookat the state of play, financially,that keeps men’s and women’s
sport miles apart, and gauged
pay levels across a dozen of
the best remunerated women’s
leagues in six sports across eight
countries. You can find that here:
https://globalsportssalaries.com/
GSSS%202017.pdf
The GSSS 2018 theme, in a
football World Cup year, wasworld football, examining in
depth topics as diverse as how
accurately the World Cup could
be predicted using the salarylevels of those involved; looking at
average pay in the top divisionsof 68 countries around the world;and looking at which clubs inelite European football were outperforming their spending, andwhich were doing the opposite.
You can find the GSSS 2018 here:
https://globalsportssalaries.com/
GSSS%202018.pdf
This edition of the GSSS, the‘Popularity Issue’, has been
prompted by several factors,

CURRENCY NOTESThe GSSS takes currency
conversion rates for each edition
at mid-year for all currencies.
This year the major rates used are£1 = US$1.25 and £1 = €1.12, with

= AUS$1.786 (Australian dollars)
while CAN$1 (Canadian dollars) =US$0.76.
If a salary has been paid in US
dollars, that figure is reported indollars, and also converted topounds. If a salary is paid in euros
or any other currency, we have
converted to pounds, and then to
US dollars, and report it in pounds
and dollars.

in previous years, figures havebeen taken from the report andconverted into other currencies atthe publication day’s rate, thenbeen picked up and converted
again. Amounts can change
quickly and significantly from their
original state. Such is the effect of
currency fluctuations. With that
digression out of the way, we canmove on.

GSSS 2018 - ORIGINS IN
POPULARITY
We reiterate this each year toprovide context and explain
how this report has evolved:
Sportingintelligence’s global sports
salaries survey was conceived
in 2009 with several aims, one ofthem to produce a substantial
piece of original research to help
promote the full launch of www.
sportingintelligence.com in early
2010.
The idea was to compare, ona like-for-like basis as closely as
possible, how much ‘average’
sportsmen earned at hundreds ofdifferent clubs and teams aroundthe world in hugely contrasting
professional sports. This would

also allow us to examine therelationship between money
and success in each sport.
To reflect global and not justwestern patterns, we needed tolook beyond one or two ‘hotspots’in European football and major
North American sport. So thestarting point for the first survey
was considering the most popular
domestic professional sports
leagues - measured by average
ticket-buying attendance pergame - and included not only
the NFL, the Premier League andother ‘major’ leagues but also
Indian Premier League cricket andJapanese baseball.
Subsequent reports have
expanded to add Australian
Rules football and Canadian
CFL gridiron, then Chinese Super
League football, Japanese
J-League football and Ligue 1
from France. The WNBA became
the first women’s league to join
the main list in the survey in 2017
when we finally obtained theaccurate team-by-team pay
data required, from the WNBA
players’ union. As and whenreliable numbers can be sourced
for new or growing leagues,
we’ll be happy to include them,and welcome any assistance inobtaining such data.
For now, the 18 leagues in the
GSSS comprise most of thebiggest professional domestic
sports leagues in the world(measured by averageattendance per game), plus
a handful of other leagues
significant for their own reasons.
The attendances for the 18
leagues in GSSS 2019 are as
follows, each for the mostrecently completed seasons.

LEAGUEAVG
TOTAL 		ATTENDANCEATTENDANCE(REG. SEASON) (REG.SEASON)

NFL

67,10017,177,581

Bundesliga 43,449

13,295,405

EPL

38,16814,503,954

AFL

35,122

6,954,187

NPB

30,92926,536,962

MLB

28,176

68,494,752

La Liga

26,811

10,188,198

IPL

25,714*

1,440,000*

Serie A

25,2379,590,166

CSL

23,9855,756,354

CFL

22,917

1,856,263

Ligue 1

22,7998,663,784

MLS

21,3108,694,584

J-League

20,511

6,091,876NBA

17,857

21,964,447

NHL

17,37722,002,081

SPL

16,016

3,171,149

WNBA

6,535

1,333,093*Best guesstimate from local
information; the IPL has been
consistently poor in measuring
and publishing accurate crowd
levels.
Of the current 15 best-attended
leagues in the world (by averagegate) the GSSS 2019 includes 13of them, the exceptions being the
Big Bash (Australia, cricket) and
Liga MX (Mexico, football), wherefull and accurate team-by-teamwage data remains elusive. The
Big Bash (average crowd 20,554)
would be 14th in the table above,or one place above the J-League,
while Liga MX (average 22,787)
would be 13th, attracting a bigger
average than Major League
Soccer and a smaller averagethan Ligue 1 in France.
7

sportingintelligence
GSSS - OUR METRIC
EXPLAINEDThe key metric in the GSSS has
always been ‘average first-teampay’. It sounds simple but to staytrue to our like-for-like target
requires a range of decisions
about what to include. What does
‘first team’ constitute at a football(soccer) club? In the NBA? In
Japanese baseball?
Typically, a first-team squadin football will be 25 players
although it may be as few as 20
and it may be more than 30. It
depends on the team. Similar
numbers of players per ‘first-teamsquad’ are used for the two
baseball leagues included - MLB
and NPB.
In the ice hockey league, theNHL, we include the players perteam on the opening day rostersof the 2019-20 season and in
NBA basketball, we include the
14 or 15 players on each roster
on the opening day of the 201920 season. In Canadian andAustralian football (CFL and Aussie
Rules AFL) the wages of around40 players are counted per teamand in the NFL it is those of 53
players per team.
By ‘average’, we mean
‘arithmetic mean’. All the salaries
are added up (and by salaries,
we include basic guaranteed pay
for playing sport for that team,
not for bonuses or endorsementsor sponsorship or anything else
extra-curricular) and divided by
the number of players. That’s
it. A simple list that provokes
complicated arguments but does,at the very least, provide a ‘ballpark’ reckoner of what different
sports teams pay.
8 			

sportingintelligence
We believe average pay isimportant - as opposed tototal wage outlay - because
two teams spending the same
totals on salaries will have starkly
different averages if they arepaying a significantly different
number of players.
It happens, and it matters. You
can employ a higher numberof lower quality players for thesame price as a smaller numberof higher quality players, and we
think it’s worth exploring which ismost effective for performance.
Arguably one of the mostcounter-intuitive findings in ourreports has been the relatively
low levels of average salaries in
America’s NFL - by far and away
the richest sport in the world interms of annual domestic TV
contract earnings, often the
bedrock of a league’s income.
NFL players are earning $3.26m(US dollars) a year each on
average in 2019, or more than
$5m less per man than NBA
basketball players this season. The
NFL ‘median’ salary, where you
consider the middle person in alist of all players ranked from bestpaid to worst-paid, only crept
above a million dollars per year inrecent times and is now $1.22m.
The best paid NFL team in thisyear’s survey, the Atlanta Falcons,
do not appear on the overall
list until No65, with the average
player there earning £3.76m.

GSSS - OUR METRICCRITIQUED
It has been argued by some
sports fans, usually in North
America, that pay-per-man isirrelevant because it is total outlay

that matters. In response: themajority of teams in the top 20
biggest total payroll size are from
elite European football leagues orMLB, not from the NFL.
Whenever we publish a newedition of the report, complaints
range from ‘average pay isirrelevant’ to ‘You should publish
the total / median / mode /range (delete as applicable) for
each club / league / sport (ditto)
by match / month / minute (andnot year, delete as applicable)
while taking into account theattendance / TV deal / TV
audience / commercial revenue’.
And on and on.

“NFL players are earning$3.26m (US dollars) a year
each on average in 2019,or more than $5m less per
man than NBA basketball
players”

We have a lot of the numbers
cited above but there are limits towhat a relatively brief (100-page)
report can carry. Anyone wanting
to explore our data sets in depth
can contact us about possibilities.
The salient point remains that wedeveloped a metric that, as asimply as possible, tries to illustrate,in the most like-for-like manner
possible, what a typical sportsman
earns in markedly different sports,
and at teams within those sports.
If you want to know what sports
teams pay overall in wages …
then in many sports you will never
be able to find out. Especially in
the USA, many teams have norequirement to publish it. Ever.
And don’t. And where there isa legal requirement to publish
accounts, as is the case for most
British football clubs (albeit longafter a season is finished), there
is no requirement to break down
what part of a wage bill went
to players, let alone to the coregroup of players who appear in
the first team.
9

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence‘backstops’ however, including
public domain sources, not all
widely known, that give a good
indication of general financial
situations. And there are sources
not in the public domain. One
example: Sportingintelligence
has undertaken consultancy andadvisory work over a number ofyears for both for quantum claims(for loss of earnings in football,mostly because of injury), andclubs, and both have involved
access to player contract data,
which is corroborative. All dataon individuals for the GSSS reports
is gathered on a confidential
basis - hence why we don’t
publish individual player salary
information.

If you want to know the numbers
for club wage bills at Europe’s
major teams for 2019-20 - via
official channels but not broken
down into players and others then you can, around Spring 2021.
Our rationale is to try to capture
what’s happening at player levelspecifically, and now.

METHODOLOGICAL NOTESThe first six editions of this report,
published annually from 2010 to2015 inclusive, were released in
Spring, usually April, and included
salaries either for the ‘active’ ormost recently completed season
for each league at the time of
publication.
For the European football leagues
up to the 2015 report, completed
seasons were used. From 2016
onwards, publication switched10 			

from Spring to Autumn, with asmuch ‘live’ data for the ongoingseasons as possible - in as many
leagues as possible.
Established access to better data
gave us the confidence to use‘live’ data for all the European
football leagues from the GSSS
2016 onwards.
As the title of the report says,
our numbers are compiled
by surveys of either A) official
player-by-player figures in the
public domain, from unions orotherwise; or B) from multiple
knowledgeable sources, more ofwhich in a moment.
As ever, all the numbers can only
ever be a snapshot of a situation
at a point in time, whether the
opening day of a season or the
day after a transfer window has
closed.

All figures (across all leagues) aresourced directly or indirectly fromone or more of unions, player
associations, players themselves,
agents, leagues, clubs and or
club sources, and other reliable
administrative bodies.
To be more specific, league byleague: the NBA numbers are in
the public domain, so too the IPL
figures (via auctions) and the MLB
numbers. For the Premier League,
and all the other European
football leagues (in Spain,
Germany, Italy, France, Scotland)
we source a specific number
for each and every individual
player, either from players
themselves, their agents or otherrepresentatives, or club sources.
It is a painstaking exercise and thefindings can only be, by a survey’s
definition, as accurate as theinformation provided. There are

The NHL numbers come directfrom the players’ union, the NFL
figures are in the public domain,
as are, in Japan, the figures forboth Japanese leagues (NPB and
J-League).
The CSL is intriguing. We obtained
official internal numbers a few
years ago when we first included
the Chinese Super League, andhave tracked the significant
changes since on a player byplayer basis. But the leaguewide situation is at best opaque.
The analysis section for the CSL
explains the revelatory nature ofEvergrande’s annual reports, andthe possibility that pay in Chinamight be even bigger than wethink.
On the subject of opaquefinances, tranches of material
that have entered the publicdomain via the Football Leaks
organisation since 2015 havegiven some insight into thefrankly astonishing contractsof some of the world’s leading
footballers, many of them playing
in the leagues we cover. These
have been useful at times forcorroboration, clearing up
whether information provided has
in fact been accurate or not. But
more usefully, this material has
made us consider further whatshould and shouldn’t be includedin ‘basic pay.’ The upshot is any
sum a player will certainly earn
- without caveats - in each yearof their contract, for domestic
club activity, is counted. And
anything that is dependent on
certain events (performancebonuses, loyalty bonuses, signingon fees split annually over timeand so on) or arises from external
endorsements or activity awayfrom their club, isn’t.
The MLS numbers are from theplayers’ union, made public to
the last cent twice a year, andthe union should be applauded
for that. The one caveat with
MLS salary figures is they do notinclude ‘any compensation fromany contracts with individual
teams or their affiliates.’ So a
player may have his MLS salary(paid centrally and declaredby the union) and a separate
contract with his team we know
nothing about.
The AFL numbers come fromvarious sources in Australia andtake more time to pull together,hence the ‘accounting lag’; andthe same is true of Canada’s CFL(except sources in Canada). The
WNBA figures were the official
numbers in 2017, and we thankthe union again for that, andhave been updated by us for2018 and 2019.

‘SHOWING THE WORKING’ SERIE A CASE STUDIESThe average Serie A salary,according to our metric, hasgrown by 17.5 per cent in a year,
and this is likely to have beenstrongly influenced by new tax
laws that will come into force in
Italy in 2020. Certain categories
of “inbound” (new) residents
to the country who agree totransfer their tax residency status
to Italy, will be given a complete
tax break on a specified partof their income, under certain
circumstances. “General workers”
and entrepreneurs will pay
personal income tax on only 30
per of their wages, for example,
while professors and researchers
will pay tax on only 10 per centof earnings. For professional
sportsmen, including footballers,
the tax break will be on 50 per
cent of their earnings, as longas they commit to staying andpaying Italian taxes for a minimumof two years.
The new tax system won’t comeinto force until next year, and until
it has been up and running forseveral years, it won’t be clear
who is actually paying less tax. So
all the Serie A salaries used for the
purposes of this year’s report havebeen calculated as gross (pretax) salaries under the current tax
structure, not the new one.
We can still assume, however,that the incoming system will
have had an effect on thehiring strategies at some clubs
who have signed players insummer 2019, new to Italy andon lucrative contracts, such as
Romelu Lukaku at Internazionale
and Aaron Ramsey at Juventus.
Player contracts in Italy are usuallynegotiated net of tax and then11

sportingintelligencethe clubs pay the players’ tax atsource. Serie A clubs will havesigned some of these new playerswith a reasonable expectationthat they will be able to save
tax in the future. But until it’shappened, they cannot be sure.
All of the above is contextual
background before explaining
in detail why Juventus’s average
first-team basic salary from lastyear has leapt from £6,726,615
then to £8,805,317 now, and how
Internazionale’s average has
actually fallen from £3,706,739
to £3,260,031, despite big
signings. And by ‘showing theworking’, it is hoped readers canbetter understand how all the
calculations for all teams in thissurvey are made.
First, Juventus. Last year theirfirst-team squad comprised 24
players - as defined by the clubthemselves on our ‘snapshot
date’ after the summer 2018transfer window closed. And those
24 players then had combined
basic pay of £161,438,750.
Divided by 24 players, that gave
an average first-team figure of£6,726,615. The dozen best paid
players alone in that squad, from
Cristiano Ronaldo to WojciechSzczęsny, collectively had basic
annual pay of £125,375,000.
One year on, and all of thosedozen players remain in the firstteam squad, and on top of that,the current squad (now 27-men
strong) contains four additional
players with huge salaries: Matthijs
de Ligt (from Ajax), Gonzalo
Higuaín (back from a loan spell at
Chelsea), Aaron Ramsey (picked
up on a “free” after his Arsenal
contract expired) and Adrien
Rabiot (free after he left PSG).

12 			

sportingintelligence
Other players moved in (and out)
but the upshot is a 27-man current
squad where we calculate
basic collective annual pay of£218,303,571 at an average of£8,085,317.
Internazionale took a different
approach to squad re-structuring.
Last year’s first-team squad for
GSSS purposes was a 23-mangroup (on ‘snapshot date’)earning collective basic pay of£85,255,000 at an average of£3,706,739. This year’s squad is a
27-man group earning collective
basic pay of £88,020,833, at an
average of £3,260,031.
Of particular note is that Inter’s
five highest paid players inlast year’s group all earned atleast £5m gross annually, andthey were Mauro Icardi, Radja
Nainggolan, Ivan Perišić, Stefande Vrij and Miranda. Four of
those five big earners are nolonger in this year’s squad: Icardi
is on loan at PSG, Nainggolan
is on loan at Cagliari, Perišić ison loan at Bayern Munich andMiranda has signed forJiangsu
Suning in the Chinese Super
League. Not only that, but thisyear’s squad contains moreyounger (and relatively low paid)
players than last year, not leastin Sebastiano Esposito, Lorenzo
Pirola and Lucien Agoumé (all17), Alessandro Bastoni (20) andFederico Dimarco (22).

GSSS FOR THE FUTURE AN APPEAL
Just as we would welcome data
for the leagues mentioned earlier(Mexico’s Liga MX and Australia’s
Big Bash), we remain interested
in adding any other leagues ofsignificance to a wide audience,either because of internationalreach or something that league
can tell us about competitivebalance and money. Suggestions
are welcome. Rugby (bothcodes) and the Olympic teamsports of water polo and volleyballwould be interesting, if you area senior administrator in one ofthose sports and want to get intouch.

“Inter’s five highest paid
players in last year’s squad
all earned at least £5mgross annually. Fourof them are not in thisyear’s squad.”We thank everyone who assistedwith helping us to find the mostreliable data possible. The
uniqueness of this study lies inlooking beyond total payrolls
or club wage bills to what theplayers make per head.
Details and links to information
about previous years’ GSSS
reports can be found via
www.globalsportssalaries.com.
Thank you for reading.
Nick Harris
EditorSporting Intelligence
December 2019

So when asked how
Internazionale’s basic salary has
gone down while signing superstar
names Lukaku and Alexis Sanchez(who isn’t costing Inter all of his
Man Utd salary), the answer isthey have shipped out four of lastseason’s five biggest earners andsimultaneously injected cheap
young blood in a slightly enlarged
first-team group.
13

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

CONTENTS
16-19

THE CATHEDRALS OF SPORT BY IAN HERBERT

20-25

THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SPORTS LEAGUE?

26-29

SERIE A’S GAMBLE ON A WAGE BONANZA

30-31“BIG 5” FOOTBALL PAY BY POSITION AND AGE

34-41

THE WORLD’S BEST PAID SPORTS TEAMS, FULL LIST

42-113LEAGUE-BY-LEAGUE ANALYSIS OF 18 LEADING SPORTS DIVISIONS

114-115 ABOUT SPORTINGINTELLIGENCE

visit sportingintelligence.com
14 			

15

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

AS SOCIETY FRACTURES,
THE CATHEDRALS OF SPORTBECOME THE COMMUNITIESTO WHICH ALL CAN BELONG.

“The Premier League is on
course to have averageattendances above 39,000 for
the first time. This would alsobeat England’s all-time
top-flight record set in 1948-49.”

By Ian Herbert

between 1948 and 1954. An iconic
pre-war image of Chelsea fans,perched precariously on the hugeadvertising fences for Bovril and
Dewars’ whisky at Stamford Bridge
reminds you that the game had
been England’s beating heart fora while. The 82,905 who packed in
to see the team play Arsenal thatday remains among the all-timehighest attendances at an English
club game.

The vast sea of faces is just about
distinguishable in the backgroundof images of Newcastle United’s
extraordinary season, four years
after the end of the Second World
War, when so many people were
paying to pass through the St
James’ Park turnstiles that the clubbought players they did not need- because they could think of noother way of burning the cash.
England had industries andindustrial heartlands in those days
and football was so central to thosecommunities across the nationthat the numbers who packed
into stadiums from the Tyne to theMersey looked like they would
never be surpassed. The sevenbest attended seasons by total
aggregate crowds in England’s top
division - when 22 top-flight teams
played 462 games - are all fromthe immediate post-war period
16 			

But it was 70 years ago, in the
1948-49 season, in the days ofJackie Milburn doing his stuff
under the great Stan Seymour,in a campaign when Newcastle
had the biggest crowds of all, that
England’s top division hit an alltime peak average attendance
per match of 38,776. A peak until
now, that is.
Taking into account the first 160
games of the current Premier
League season, with more than
two-fifths of the season gone, thedivision is on course to surpass every
season before it, bar none. By thetime each team had played eightgames at home (by 9 December2019) this season’s numbers weretracking to attain an average wellover 39,000 per game, and quitepossibly closer to 39,500.
It’s a different world now in somany ways and in part the

popularity of the Premier League
is a reflection of the shiny, digitalproduct it has become. Consider
some of the images of pre-Premier
League supporter experiences
captured by the peerlessdocumentary photographer
Stuart Roy Clarke in his book ‘The
Homes of Football.’ A Brighton
supporter being led towards thewrecked fencing of a dilapidated
terrace in 1991 after a play-off
against Millwall descended into
violence. Cardiff fans trying to
break out of their terrace to fightLuton Town supporters. You see
why modernisation has served
supporters well. The 2019 grounds,
all-seaters now, are a place wheremen, women and children all
belong.
The appeal is a consequence of
the Premier League transforming
the product, of course, withpreviously unimaginable camera
angles and unprecedented
quality of analysis and, it has
to be said, never-ending hype.
All unimaginable in the 1980s
when, as the respected British
commentator Clive Tyldesleyrelated recently, Liverpool chief
executive Peter Robinson was soconcerned about broadcasters
appropriating his club that only
the second half of the team’s
games could be ‘called.’ The
monumental TV rights deals - the17

sportingintelligence

economic core of the new world- have given the broadcasters
the control and, in turn, given the
football clubs the money to bring
the best players into the new
global league.
Once upon a time - say 1949 - thenewspapers did not even reporton all the big games played. Even
the papers of the 1980s provided
coverage which was relatively
sparse, with the thoughts of the
managers a marginal component.
Now the manager’s thoughts area sub-genre, known the world overwithin in an instant and often theprime focus of football journalists,
who know that describing who
passed to whom and whoscored the goal - ‘run-of-play’,in the parlance - is inadequate.
The global audience will almost
certainly have seen the goals
already. Actually wanting to be
there has become, demonstrably,a driver of crowds.
Luxembourgers and Belgians are to
be found at Turf Moor, Burnley. The
Finns love Norwich City. Manchester
United and Liverpool have a huge
Far East draw. Recently publishedresearch by VisitBritain showed that
800,000 international visitors attend
English football matches annually,
with many of those going to Premier
League games. From China andIndia, Norway, Sweden, Brazil, theUSA and dozen of other countries
they come, to Old Trafford and theEmirates, to Tottenham and Villa
and all points between, in record
numbers.
But association football is only one
strand to this story. Attendance
numbers provide an extraordinary
insight into the enduring worldwide
popularity of myriad team sports
at a time when action has never18 			

sportingintelligence

been more available from tablet
to TV, pub to public square
and when ticket prices in many
leagues have never been higher.
You could be forgiven for thinking
that the NFL is feeling anxious
about audiences as it seeks newones in the UK, China and points
in between. Yet it remains thebest attended professional sports
league in the world by averageattendance. Baseball has also
been undergoing something of an
existential crisis, with sales of MLB
tickets down one million on 2018
and 11 million on its 2007 peakof 79.5m. Nonetheless, the way it
shifts 68 million tickets per season average gate: nearly 30,000 - is still
phenomenal for a league in which
every team plays 162 regularseason games.
And then there is US college
football - the phenomenon
surpassing all phenomena.
No fewer than 21 different US
college gridiron teams had bigger
average attendances in 2018 than
the average NFL side. Michigan
have had an average crowd of
more than 100,000 for every gamefor 44 years. There are only sevenhome games most years, but 293
consecutive attendances of morethan 100k is still extraordinary,
testament to the way that US
audiences are drawn to watch
the young, unproven future starsof the game while most othernations are absorbed only by thesuperstars. This season’s average
crowd at Michigan’s ‘Big House’in Ann Arbor when the homecampaign ended on the last dayof November: 111,420.
The numbers in Germany’s
Bundesliga are not so stratospheric
but they still point to the huge andenduring appeal of being there,
beside the field of play. The league- second only to NFL anywhere on
the planet - will again record an
average gate comfortably above
40,000 per match. At Dortmund
the average is double that andmore, with more than 24,000
occupying the famous ‘Yellow
Wall’ terrace alone. Bundesliga
rules barring commercial entities
from owning more than 49 percent of clubs have meant lessoligarch or petro-dollar wealthflooding into the division than thePremier League. Yet the German
game has more than madeup for that in the quality of fan
experience and affordability oftickets with far fewer priced out
than in the top English division.
NPB, Japan’s pro baseball league,
has the fifth highest averageattendance of the 18 leagues inthis GSSS report, surpassing MLB,again. Higher than either of those,
Aussie Rules football - fourth in ourtable - continues to be a hugedraw in that country.

global journey with sport. The slumsof Sao Paulo can, in a very real
sense, access Anfield. Manchester
United replica shirts are abundantin the dusty streets of Kampala.

Michael Jordan memorably
once said. Many of sport’s mostlegendary utterances crystallise its
capacity to inspire. That religiosity,
again.

For very many, sport provides asense of identity which can be
hard to locate and a way to fit
in. Sociologists, who have beenporing over the reasons for this foryears, identify the way it provides‘totems’: points of connection andoutlets for ritual and religiosity. But
there is no need to intellectualise
it. Sport binds together old
and young, rich and poor in acommunion of the highs and,just as much, lows. The intensityof a moment of extraordinary
skill, endurance or good fortune,delivered to the benefit of a team,is no more a source of communion
than the cruel bitterness of defeat.
For some, being there is also asource of personal motivation.
‘You have to expect things ofyourself before you do them,’

For some, the thrill now comes fromfollowing more than one team.
Many of the younger generations
will follow multiple clubs, following
players they cherish from place toplace because of a loyalty whichtranscends teams. Those players
are more reachable in an age
when they can communicate
directly through social media
platforms and not through thetraditional prism of clubs or media.

to a wider world than to stoke
intolerance.
And the unifying effect prevails
more than ever. One of themost vivid images in Stuart Roy
Clarke’s book depicts a group of
Newcastle United fans on a 1990
journey to Suffolk to support theirstruggling team, near the bottomof Division Two at the time. The
look of joyful optimism on theirfaces as they stand together inthe dusk, with the floodlights in the
background, distils what it means
to travel in unison to a far-flungstadium and what that experience

It’s not a universally positive
picture. A stubborn strand of
bigotry witnessed towards football
players reveals that racism is alive
and well - most tangibly in Italy,
Russia and some areas of theformer Yugoslavia. But football
has done far more to promote
understanding and connect fansactually brings. Friendship,community, laughter, hope. The
world needs more of all four.
Ian Herbert is a sportswriter for the
Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday
You can follow him on Twitter@ianherbs

These astonishing numbers point
incontrovertibly to sport’s placeas the new religion. Its vocabularyalone - faith, sacrifice, commitment,
dedication, spirit, prayer - tells
us it is the coalescing force thatthe church once was and so it
continues to be. As an increasingly
polarised society fractures andthe numbers looking to organised
religion decline, sport provides thegreat cathedrals; the communities
to which all can belong.
The shrill populist voices in worldpolitics have seized on thefrustrations and suspicions of thoseleft behind, disenfranchised andimpoverished by globalisation,
though everyone makes the19sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

PREMIER LEAGUE: THE
WORLD’S MOST POPULAR
SPORTS LEAGUE?
The headline carries a question
mark because debates of this kind
are inevitably partisan and highly
charged. But in assessing objective
data to find which professionaldomestic sports league is the mostpopular in the world, England’s
Premier League has the strongest
claim. Perhaps.
Spanish football’s top division,
La Liga, is certainly a challenger,
driven by two sporting giants
in Real Madrid and Barcelona.
So too is the NBA, the world’s
premium product in basketball,the second most popular global
professional team sport after
football (soccer).

The NFL can rightly argue it puts
more bums on seats per match
than anyone, and is increasingly
doing so on foreign soil. And Major
League Baseball can point tomore than 68m tickets sold in 2019.
And then there is the Indian Premier
League, the IPL, the most prominent
club competition now in a sportthat almost certainly had the mosteyeballs on a single fixture this year.
India’s victory over Pakistan in thegroup stage of the cricket World
Cup on 16 June in Manchester,
England, attracted low hundredsof millions of viewers, with India’s
official audience monitoring
agency, BARC, telling us most ofthem were in the sub-continent.

But without further ado, we’ll moveto the data.

SOCIAL MEDIA POPULARITY
In the social media age, the most
simple, obvious way to measure
popularity is social media. So
for the 350 teams featured inthis report, we first counted theaggregate number of followersthat all the teams in each league
had amassed (combined) by midNovember 2019 on the principal
accounts of the three mostpopular social media channels:
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Rounding up the nearest 25m (forleagues over 50m) and to thenearest million (for leagues under25m), this graphic tells the story.

La Liga and the Premier League
are the joint most popular leagues
in the world, followed by the NBA(clear in third), then the NFL andSerie A (basically equal), then the
Bundesliga, MLB, IPL and Ligue 1(ditto). A drop-off leads to the NHL,and another to MLS.

is down to No7. Ligue 1 and MLB
are almost equally popular on totalsocial media following but MLB has
10 more teams than Ligue 1, so
each MLB team, on average, has
fewer followers than the clubs inFrance’s top football division.

Looking at which league is themost popular by average followers
produces a different outcome. The
Premier League and La Liga remain
joint first but the IPL jumps to No3,
pushing the NBA to No4, before
Serie A and Bundesliga in No5 andNo6. The NFL in this measurement

Our third social media table shows
how individual teams within the
18 assessed leagues fare in social
media. The 20 most followed arecomprised of 15 football clubs, fourbasketball teams and a cricket
team. The precise number offollowers for all 350 teams in this

GSSS are in the league-by-league
pages.
If the Premier League and La
Liga are essentially equal in total
followers and equal in followers byclub on average then this tableacts as a tie-breaker. La Liga has
two representatives in the top 10
and three in the top 20. The Premier
League has five in the top 10 andsix in the top 20. The NBA has four inthe top 20. On this metric, simple as
it is, the world’s three most popularsports leagues are the Premier
League, La Liga and the NBA.

AVERAGE SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWERS BY CLUBS WITHIN EACH LEAGUE, ON CLUB’S
PRINCIPAL FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS, DECEMBER 2019

TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWERS BY LEAGUE, FOR ALL CLUBS COMBINED, ON CLUBS’PRINCIPAL FACEBOOK, TWITTER AND INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS, DECEMBER 2019RANK TEAM

20 			SPORT LEAGUERANK TEAMSPORT LEAGUE

1Real Madrid

La Liga

11

Los Angeles Lakers		

NBA

2Barcelona

La Liga

12

Milan		

Serie A

3

Man Utd

Premier League

13

Golden State Warriors		

NBA

4

Chelsea

Premier League

14

Borussia Dortmund		

Bundesliga

5

Juventus

Serie A

15

Atlético Madrid		

La Liga6

Bayern Munich

Bundesliga

16

Chicago Bulls		

NBA

7

PSG

Ligue 1

17

Internazionale		

Serie A

8

Liverpool

Premier League

18

Miami Heat		

NBA

9ArsenalPremier League

19

Tottenham		Premier League

10

Man City

Premier League

20

Mumbai Indians		

IPL
21

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

MONEY TALKING: GLOBALBROADCASTING RIGHTSVALUES
Perceptions of a sports league’s
global allure are inevitably skewed
when viewed from within. So within
the USA, where the biggest single
socio-cultural annual event eachyear is Super Bowl - typically drawing
an average of more than 100m
TV viewers just within America’s
borders - the NFL could not be abigger deal. Many NFL fans inside
the USA will perceive Super Bowl asa huge global event. Yet even as
the NFL is doing excellent work intrying to nurture and expand foreignaudiences, there remains - relatively
speaking - marginal interest in muchof the world. The number of viewers
inside the USA dwarfs the numberin the entire rest of the worldcombined, comfortably.

Similarly, within European football,all of the ‘Big 5’ top-division footballleagues routinely make claims
about the number of billions ofpeople they ‘reach’, or can reach.
Claimed TV audiences are routinely
exaggerated so far beyond realitythat fans of La Liga’s big two
clubs actually believe El Clásico
is watched by more than 600m
people. Indeed La Liga’s own
official website has boasted the
fixture has “a potential audienceof 600 million viewers and can befollowed live and in HD in over 170
countries.” The most important wordin that sentence is “potential”. What
La Liga don’t say is that the figurestated is around 10 times the realitythat transpires, and probably more.

broadcasting rights for each league

One way to consider the global(non-domestic) popularity ofleagues is look at cold, hard cash,or the annual earnings from all

total income comes from foreign

derived from foreign markets. For
the purposes of this exercise wehave looked at the ‘Big 5’ leaguesof North America (NFL, NBA, MLB,NHL and MLS) and the ‘Big 5’
football leagues of Europe.
Most neutral observers canprobably agree that the mostpopular league in the world - withgenuine widespread popularity
across all continents - comes fromsomewhere within that group.
Our table ranks the leagues inorder of their current annual foreign
rights income, and also details
their domestic rights income, total
income, and what percentage ofrights. We would argue that this is
not a bad proxy for genuine global
popularity.

ANNUAL BROADCASTING INCOME BY LEAGUE, RANKED BY HIGHESTEARNINGS FROM FOREIGN (NON-DOMESTIC) SOURCES
LEAGUE OVERSEAS RIGHTS OVERSEAS RIGHTS DOMESTIC RIGHTS DOMESTIC RIGHTS TOTAL RIGHTSTOTAL RIGHTS							OVERSEAS % OF
TOTAL RIGHTS£ per year

$ per year

£ per year

$ per year

£ per year

$ per year

EPL

£1,400,000,000$1,750,000,000£1,665,000,000$2,081,250,000£3,065,000,000$3,831,250,000

45.7%

La Liga£800,000,000$1,000,000,000£1,017,857,143$1,272,321,429£1,817,857,143$2,272,321,429

44.0%

NBA

£360,000,000$450,000,000£2,133,333,333$2,666,666,666£2,493,333,333$3,116,666,666

14.4%

Serie A

£336,607,143$420,758,929£868,750,000$1,085,937,500£1,205,357,143$1,506,696,429

27.9%

Bundesliga£218,000,000$272,500,000£1,035,714,286$1,294,642,857£1,253,714,286$1,567,142,857

17.4%

MLB

£120,000,000$150,000,000£1,200,000,000$1,500,000,000£1,320,000,000$1,650,000,000

9.1%

NFL

£96,000,000$120,000,000£3,520,000,000$4,400,000,000£3,616,000,000$4,520,000,000

2.7%

Ligue 1

£71,428,571$89,285,714£1,026,785,714$1,283,482,143£1,098,214,286$1,372,767,857

6.5%

NHL

£12,000,000$15,000,000£160,000,000$200,000,000£172,000,000$215,000,000

7.0%

MLS

£12,000,000$15,000,000£72,000,000$90,000,000£84,000,000$105,000,000

14.3%22 			The Premier League is way out
in front in foreign broadcastingearnings, making £1.4BN a year,or £4.2bn for the current threeyear rights cycle from 2019-22. The
Chinese digital broadcaster PPTV
alone is paying around £185m a
year, and NBC in the USA is paying$1bn (around £800m) over six
years to 2022, or around £133m
per year. Broadcasters in Thailand,
Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong,
Scandinavia, France, the Middle
East, South America and subSaharan Africa are each paying
tens of millions per year for Premier
League rights.
Of total annual broadcasting rightof around £3.1bn per year, thePremier League’s overseas rights
contribute nearly 46 per cent of
the total.
La Liga, with £800m annual
earnings from foreign rights, are along way second on aggregate
but that still equates to 44 per centof La Liga earnings, and still puts
them well clear of the third highest
foreign rights earners, the NBA, on£360m. For the NBA this equates
to 14 per cent of rights earnings.
The five North American leagues
all make the vast majority of rights
income from within North America.
The figures for the European
football leagues are all a matterof public record, and we thankSportBusiness for the foreign rights
figures for the North American
leagues. Other knowledgeable
sources inside US sport assisted inclarifying some details. We asked
all the leagues for confirmation of
the numbers and none wanted
to confirm them, on the record. Ina rapidly changing marketplace
it is quite feasible that the North
American leagues are making
additional sums, relatively small
at the moment, from direct-to-

consumer international digitalchannels on top of ‘traditional’
rights income.
Using the metric of annual foreign
rights income, the world’s mostpopular three leagues, again, arethe Premier League, La Liga, andthe NBA.
It should be noted that if
considered in the same way, thencricket’s IPL has total and foreign
rights annually that are dwarfed
by these bigger leagues. Star India
hold the current global rights (forIndia and everywhere else) in a£2bn, five-year deal that runs to2022 and is worth just under £400m
per year. Given the vast majority of
the IPL’s global audience is within
India, which has a populationof more than 1.3bn people, wewould attribute most of that £400m
per year to ‘domestic’ value, andsome tens of millions of pounds at
most to foreign rights value.

DO RIGHTS FEES REFLECTVIEWERS?
In trying to gauge whether
rights earnings are an accurate
reflection of audience size, thehonest answer is: it is impossible totell, definitively, but probably yes.
It is impossible to tell because, forthe most part, sports leagues neverpublish detailed breakdowns of
their global viewing figures. And
they never do it, we have toassume, because the figures aremuch smaller than most people
believe, and are absolutely
nowhere close to claims ofhundreds of millions for a single“ordinary” game.
The NFL has huge domestic TV
contracts because the NFL draws
huge domestic TV audiences,of 15.8m people inside the USA
on average for a regular season
game in 2018. Super Bowl is thecherry on top. But again, most of
the viewers are inside the USA.
MLB’s premium content, the World
Series, has averaged between
10m and 20m viewers for the past
20 years, inside the USA. Regularseason games averaged 2.4m
on FOX in 2019, and 1.6m on
ESPN, both of those increases
on 2018. An MLB spokesman
told Sportingintelligence: “It is
impossible to secure the average
viewership for a game outside
the US when there are so many
countries carrying games.”
But the reality is audiences inmost countries will be tiny. To give
one example: baseball is huge
in Japan, and Ichiro Suzuki, who
spent 19 years in MLB, including
with the New York Yankees andthe Seattle Mariners, is viewed
in Japan as among the greatest
Japanese sportsmen of all time.
His final MLB match was played in
March, on Japanese soil, as theMLB 2019 season opened with theMariners facing the Oakland A’s ina series in Tokyo. Japan’s greatest
contemporary sporting hero, onhome soil, in a competitive MLB
match, drew a household rating of
2.2m in Japan, the highest rating
for an MLB game since 2004. That
equates to around 2.5m people
in a nation of 127m. This is not tobelittle MLB or indeed Ichiro, rather
to illustrate even some ‘huge’occasions are not as huge as
widely perceived.
The average global audience
for a ‘big’ Premier League willreach a few tens of millions, as
will El Clásico in Spain. There ismore reading about this on the
Sportingintelligence website,
especially in a report called The
Premier League In Numbers, and23

sportingintelligencein associated materials, all ofwhich can be found at this link:
https://www.sportingintelligence.
com/2015/12/31/the-premierleague-in-numbers311201/
The Premier League gave an
indication of their real recent
numbers earlier this year whenannouncing the global cumulative
audience for 2018-19 was
3.2bn, and that the global live
cumulative audience was 1.35bn.
Given that there are 380 gamesin the season, that equates toan average of 8.4m per game(including non-live coverage inhighlights show) and 3.55m per
game for live coverage. And
that’s globally. Not all games areshown in all markets, of course,
including in the Premier League’s
home market of the UK. So theactual average audience pershown game (including highlights)
is somewhere over 10m andthe live total will be higher than
3.55m. “Big” games will be seen
by substantially more people and“small” games by virtually nobody.
Those familiar with the datafor other leagues confirm thesame phenomena there. And afascinating academic paper from2016, “English Soccer’s Mysterious
Worldwide Popularity”, cited anaverage global audience pergame for the Premier League
at 12m while Europe’s other big
leagues attracted between 2mand 4.5m per game.
These are bewilderingly small
numbers to many people
assuming massive audiences
are common. And the market ischanging, rapidly and in different
ways, not least digitally.
But if you start with home market
averages and reason that yourproduct won’t be as popular24 			

sportingintelligenceelsewhere, it starts to make sense.
The average Premier League
game in the UK will attract anaverage of maybe 1m people. The
average La Liga game in Spain will
be half of that. Any given Premier
League match won’t hit even 1m
in most markets and only reach thehundreds of thousands in a few.
Barring the release of detailed
figures by those who know them
- the leagues themselves - thefull picture won’t be known. But
overseas rights values are almost
certainly a good indication of thereal size of a worldwide audience.

AND FINALLY…
THE CROWDS
Our final table in this section
details average crowds for themost recent completed seasonsof the leagues featured in thisGSSS, plus how they measure up to
all-time highest averages in thoseleagues. As detailed elsewherein these pages, it is forecast thePremier League in 2019-20 willregister the highest top-division
average of all time. For now thatrecord is held by the 1948-49
season. Notable this year is thatboth Japanese baseball (NPB)and football (J-League) set alltime attendance records in 2019,with the NPB now attracting morefans per game than MLB in North
America. Conversely, Italy’s Serie A
and Canada’s CFL must look backmore than three decades to themid 1980s for their heydays.
For the final element in this table- a proxy measurement of foreign
popularity for 10 of the leagues we are grateful to StubHub, theworld’s largest ticket marketplace,for mining their massive databaseto provide some insights.
StubHub have tens of millionsof customers around the world
buying tickets to entertainment
events, not least sporting events.
Their database knows where
all the buyers are from, and so
we asked them to tell us whatpercent of their ticket purchases
for each of 10 leagues (the Big 5
of North America and the Big 5 ofEuropean football) were made byfans who would travel outside theirown borders to watch the gameor match in question. Clearly there
will be flaws in this, not least a biasthat StubHub is US-based witha big US customer base. But it isnonetheless interesting that all fiveEuropean football leagues havehigh percentages of StubHub sales
to people travelling across borders
to watch, and no US league had
more than 16 per cent of StubHub
sales doing likewise.
The 10 nations buying most Premier
League tickets via StubHub in2019 are, in order, the USA, Korea,
Ireland, Canada, Germany, Spain,
France, Australia, Japan and theNetherlands. For La Liga it is theUSA, the UK, Mexico, Japan, South
Korea, France, Canada, Brazil,
Israel and China. For Serie A it is theUSA, the UK, Switzerland, Germany,
Japan, France, Mexico, Thailand,
China and Brazil. For the Bundesliga
it is the USA, the UK, Korea, Japan,
Switzerland, Canada, Austria, China,
France and Mexico. And for Ligue
1 it is the USA, Brazil, the UK, Japan,
Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands,
Ireland, Spain and Korea.
StubHub say the UK is “themost popular destination forinternational travellers to book an
event [of any kind via StubHub]”and that 60 per cent of people
travelling across borders to the
UK for an event are going to asports event. This includes US sports
events being played on British soil.

ATTENDANCES IN GSSS 2019 LEAGUES… AND THEIR ALL-TIME BEST FIGURESLEAGUE

AVG ATTENDANCE,
MOST RECENTLYCOMPLETED SEASONBEST EVER AVG
ATTENDANCE,REGULAR SEASONSEASON OF
BEST AVG
ATTENDANCE% OF STUBHUB TICKETS
SOLD IN 2019 TO THISLEAGUE WHO WEREFOREIGN VISITORS		

67,10069,487

2016-176%

Bundesliga 		

43,44945,116

2011-1243%

Premier League

38,16838,776

1948-49

38%

AFL

		

35,122

36,996

2008

-

NPB

		

30,92930,929

2019

-

MLB

		

28,17632,704

2007

3%

		

26,811

30,532

1994-95

66%

C.26,000

Unknown

Unknown-		25,23738,872

1984-85

67%

CSL

		

23,98524,238

2016

-

CFL

		

22,91730,203

1983

-

		

22,79923,1602000-0173%

		

21,31022,106

2017

7%

		

20,75020,750

2019

-

NBA

		

17,857

17,9872017-18

16%

NHL

		

17,377

17,6902013-14

15%

Scottish Premiership		

16,016

18,534

1998-99

-

WNBA

6,535

10,869

1998

-

NFL

La Liga
IPL		Serie A

Ligue 1MLS

J-League		The baseball series between the
New York Yankees and the Boston
Red Sox in London in June, forexample, saw people from 42
different countries buying tickets
for them via Stub Hub alone, as
well as fans from 44 of the USA’s 50
states. Demand for the Yankees-

Red Sox game on 29 June
outstripped demand on StubHub
for any other entertainment eventof any genre, including concerts
by the Spice Girls, Drake, Pink andFleetwood Mac. For the autumn’s
NFL games in London, StubHub
sold tickets to people from 43

different countries. For the NBA’s
UK game in January, StubHub soldtickets to fans in 32 countries.

25

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

SERIE A GAMBLES ON WAGESPAYING SPORTING DIVIDEND
Italy’s Serie A was perhaps thefirst high-achieving global footballleague. Between 1989 and 1998,
22 out of the 40 European Cup
and UEFA Cup finalists were Italian,with a further three making the
Cup-Winners’ Cup final. In thesame period, the global transfer
record was broken five times by
Italian teams, and by the summerof 1998 nearly half of the 100 mostexpensive deals in history involved
an Italian buyer.

Omar Chaudhuri is Head ofFootball Intelligence at 21st Club,an advisory business for footballclubs, assisting key decision
makers in strategic problemsolving and recruitment. Formed
in 2013, they work with forwardthinking clubs who are looking
to outsmart rather than outspend
their rivals, using an evidencebased approach and leveraging
the power of analytics to help
teams gain a competitive edge.
Taking into account the GSSS
2019 wage data for the 98 teamsin the ‘Big 5’ divisions of Europe,
Chaudhuri explores why the
clubs of Serie A in Italy arecollectively experiencing thebiggest year-on-year spikein average basic pay. But thisrenewed level of investment
in talent comes with risk, notleast whether the extra financial
outlay will bring commensurate
rewards in terms of results. Or are
they, like the Premier League,
paying over the odds?
26 			In the 1990s, it was Italian footballthat paid the best wages in world
football. In fact up until 2002, thehighest average take-home pay,
inclusive of bonuses and benefits
was in Serie A. The Premier League
took that mantle in 2002-03 andhas kept it since. But in an era
when the Premier League currently
reigns supreme, it is easy to forgetthat the centre of the football
universe was not so long ago some
900 miles further south.
The decline of Serie A is welldocumented, with eroding
infrastructure, issues with Ultra
culture, and corruption scandals
all weakening the league’s
position globally. According toUEFA, the average club in theleague now earns less annuallythan teams in England, Spain andGermany’s top flights, and since2008 has been the slowest growingof the traditional big five European
leagues.
However, there are signs that theleague is beginning to punch
back, driven by clubs investing
substantially in their playing

squads. The Global Sports Salary
Survey 2019 reveals that the
average pay of a Serie A playerrose 17 per cent from last season,
to almost £1.8million per man. The
other major leagues collectively
increased pay by two percent,with Premier League pay risingby six percent. From being some
way behind England and Spain as
the third-biggest payer in the big
five leagues last year, Italian clubs
have this year halved the pay gap
to their La Liga counterparts.
In the absence of a new
broadcast deal, part of the uplift
in spending can perhaps be
attributed to future changes in
the Italian tax system, whereby
from 2020 players who move fromabroad and stay for two years
will be given a tax exemption on
50 percent of their salaries. Clubs
have seemingly reacted to thisfuture change in regulation, witha series of high-profile Premier
League players joining Serie A
clubs last summer. It’s not just the
top end of Serie A investing either- clubs outside the top six or seventeams in Italy have experienced
the highest wage growth over thelast twelve months.
As we explored in last year’s reportthough, bigger spending is no
guarantee of future success. The
21st Club World Super League – anindex that ranks teams globally in
one league table – allows us tocompare the GSSS wage data toperformance, and therefore theefficiency of spending of different
teams. In 2018, the Premier League
was highlighted as the biggest

under-performers of the big fiveleagues, with some clubs paying
over twice as much in salaries asteams on the continent to achieve
comparable performance. In
many ways this was the costof being known as the biggest
spenders, with selling clubs andagents willing to wait until Premier
League teams paid the price.
In 2019, it seems as though Serie A
clubs are stuck in the same trap.
Of the 30 most inefficient teamsin the major leagues, ten are
Italian and eleven are English. Of
the 30 most efficient, it’s just threeand five respectively. Spanish
and German teams dominate
the top of these rankings. Clubs
like Torino and Fiorentina haveseen performance fall backwards
despite notable increases in pay.
While last season the average
Premier League team was rated
as having the lowest performance
return for salaries spent, this season

it is the average Serie A team whocomes bottom of the pile.

academy, which is the mostproductive in England.

You can find teams on parallelpaths in Serie A and the Premier
League, too. Manchester Unitedand Milan rank as the 6th and14th-most inefficient teams
respectively in the big five leagues;
they’re in the region of 10 to 15
points per season worse off than
we would expect based on theirfirst-team pay. However, bothclubs are looking to address thisby turning to youth. As of thestart of December 2019, only 10
teams in the major leagues had astarting 11 average age of under
25, and two of those were Unitedand Milan. For both clubs, there’s
been a strategic shift away fromsigning big-money, peak-age
players. In Milan’s case, a change
in ownership has catalysed
this approach, while United
have complemented younger
signings with prospects from their

Of course, while it is possible tochange strategy overnight, it
is not possible to change yoursquad over the same time frame,and both Milan and United areto a degree still encumberedby players whose performancedoes not match the expectationsof their pay. RB Leipzig have
however shown how a long-term
dedication to youth can reap
rewards. With the fourth-youngest
team in the big five leagues, theGerman club are rated as themost efficient at turning pay into
points. They have been the 11thbest team this season in the big
five leagues with the 31st-highest
wages, with an average first teamsalary below that of Newcastle
United, Watford and Aston Villa.
The club – and the wider Red Bullgroup - dedicate a significant
amount of its resources to young
27

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

La Liga club
Barcelona
Real Madrid
Atlético Madrid
Valencia
SevillaAthletic Club
Villarreal
Celta Vigo
Real Sociedad
Real Betis
Espanyol
Leganés
LevanteGetafeGranadaEibar
Deportivo Alavés
Mallorca
Real Valladolid
Osasuna

PAY (£M)
9.8
8.9
5.6
2.5
2.0
1.7
1.4
1.3
1.3
1.2
1.0
0.8
0.7
0.7
0.6
0.6
0.5
0.5
0.4
0.4

TEAM RATING
918
851
857
787
791
749
749
686
757
687
695
634
722
762
683
683
687
623
655
691

Serie A club

PAY (£M)

TEAM RATING

Juventus
Roma
Internazionale
Napoli
Milan
Lazio
TorinoBologna
Fiorentina
Cagliari
Atalanta
Genoa
Sampdoria
Sassuolo
Lecce
Parma
SPAL
UdineseHellas Verona
Brescia

8.1
3.6
3.3
3.1
2.8
1.9
1.5
1.3
1.2
1.2
1.0
1.0
1.0
0.9
0.9
0.8
0.8
0.7
0.5
0.5

844
772
809
802
690
739
686
629
654
662
755
590
618
635
572
618
584
583
569
562

EPL club
Manchester City
Manchester United
Liverpool
ArsenalChelsea
EvertonTottenham Hotspur
Leicester City
West Ham
Crystal Palace
Southampton
Wolverhampton
Newcastle
Watford
Aston Villa
Bournemouth
Burnley
Brighton
Norwich City
Sheffield United

Pay (£m)
7.0
6.1
5.5
4.8
4.8
4.1
4.0
3.4
3.0
2.9
2.3
2.2
2.1
2.0
2.0
1.9
1.9
1.8
1.0
0.7

Team Rating
968
777
943
784
840
707
843
831
685
708
634
728
692
629
670
685
691
647
622
715

Ligue 1 club
PSG
MonacoLyon
Marseille
Lille
Saint-Étienne
RennesBordeaux
Nice
Montpellier
NantesToulouse
AngersStrasbourg
Dijon
Amiens
Metz
Reims
Brest
Nîmes

Pay (£m)
7.1
2.3
1.9
1.6
1.1
0.8
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.5
0.5
0.4
0.4
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.3
0.2

Team Rating
879
623
745
673
695
659
659
651
626
673
637
542
631
625
551
567
583
656
599
603

Bundesliga club
Bayern Munich
Borussia Dortmund
Bayer Leverkusen
RB Leipzig
Wolfsburg
Schalke 04
Borussia M’gladbach
Hoffenheim
Werder Bremen
Eintracht Frankfurt
Hertha BSC
Köln
Augsburg
Mainz 05
Fortuna Düsseldorf
Freiburg
Union Berlin
Paderborn

Pay (£m)
6.5
4.0
2.5
1.9
1.9
1.7
1.5
1.4
1.3
1.2
1.0
1.0
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.6
0.5
0.3

Team Rating
918
800
745
839
721
699
739
723
688
729
642
627
629
637
619
681
648
604

28 			

player recruitment, and both onfield results and player sales attest
to that strategy being a success.
However, this isn’t the only routeto overachievement. Spanishside Getafe are second to RB
Leipzig in the efficiency rankings– and they have the 11th-oldest
team in the big five leagues.
Getafe narrowly missed out onChampions League footballlast season, and this season still
comfortably pay bottom-halfsalaries in La Liga. Their successis built on a miserly defence anddirect, counter-attacking football,eschewing modern demands
to attack and dominate andtherefore going against the grainof what opponents are used
to playing (not unlike Leicester
in 2015-16). Sheffield United,
who are rated as the third-mostefficient team in England behind
Liverpool and Manchester City,

have also surprised opponents
with a ‘alternative’ playing style
approach. For both these teams it
is crucial that this ‘IP’ isn’t lost witha change of head coach in the
future.
While in our work with clubs wehave identified several areas ofbest practice in recruitment andsquad planning processes, theGSSS data proves that there aredifferent models to find efficiency,
and that there’s no one-size-fitsall approach. Getafe and Leipzig
provide credence to the viewthat clarity of vision and strategy
are good starting points, andobservations about teams on theinefficient end of the scale backs
this up. It is not uncommon for
us to see shortlists of players andcoaches who have no consistentattributes, or business plans thatgrossly misjudge the team’s
underlying performance.

Ultimately, it is efficiency ofspending by its teams that will
enable the Serie A to catch up
with rival leagues. With broadcast
rights beginning to plateau fordomestic competitions, Italianclubs will only be able to spend
so much to attract better players
in the future. This means a returnto the heydays of the 1990s arecontingent on clubs up and down
the division discovering theiridentity and forming strategies thatare precise, coherent, and notdependent on winning a spendingarms race with the rest of Europe.
For contact details and morebackground information on what
21st Club do, please visit:https://www.21stclub.com
Follow Omar on Twitter
twitter.com/omarchaudhuri
or 21st Club on Twitter at
www.twitter.com/21stclub

29

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

VALUE FOR MONEY BY
POSITIONS AND AGE IN
FOOTBALL: THAT STRIKER
ON BIG WAGES IS PROBABLYNOT BEING PAID ENOUGH
By Omar Chaudhuri
Head of Football Intelligence at 21st Club

COUNTRYLEAGUEAGE BRACKET

GK

DF

MF

FW

TOTAL

EnglandPremier League

Up to 23

£843,143£1,832,629£2,115,750£3,037,273£2,129,750

Spain

La Liga

Up to 23

£503,425£646,403£1,004,163£2,273,109£1,149,710

Italy

Serie A

Up to 23

£1,053,241£987,202£1,037,311£961,982£1,004,783

Germany

Bundesliga

Up to 23

£420,625£792,430£1,090,518£1,046,339£895,737

FranceLigue 1Up to 23

£182,049£405,659£432,564£843,505£498,332							EnglandPremier League

23-29£3,212,182£3,005,443£3,819,563£4,032,261£3,521,556

Spain

La Liga

23-29£1,826,392£1,489,928£2,253,666£2,117,644£1,908,790

Italy

Serie A

23-29

£1,111,820£1,678,972£1,803,992£2,447,385£1,817,017

Germany

Bundesliga

23-29£1,378,327£1,659,948£2,046,790£1,612,373£1,774,016

FranceLigue 123-29

£1,000,095£1,020,252£980,542£1,859,236£1,199,863							EnglandPremier League

30-plus£2,197,000£2,918,933£4,632,000£4,573,833£3,278,035

Spain

La Liga

30-plus£1,551,282£2,016,120£2,533,964£6,432,656£2,963,852

Italy

Serie A

30-plus£1,298,701£1,880,631£2,342,033£4,749,589£2,576,631

Germany

Bundesliga

30-plus£1,343,508£1,880,733£1,751,063£3,766,579£2,135,075

FranceLigue 130-plus£1,514,713£1,320,250£1,895,000£3,189,727£1,752,085							

One of the starkest transfer trends
at the elite end of the football in
recent years has been an increasein spending on goalkeepers. The
transfer record for the positionstood for 17 years, until it was
broken twice in the space of a
few weeks in 2018 by Liverpool
and Chelsea. For years, it wasquestioned whether the position
was undervalued, and the
response from the industry seemedat the very least to be “notanymore”.

evaluated against market priceto determine whether the player isworth the money.

That, however, did not fully answer
the question – it was merely amoving of market forces. Were
goalkeepers realising their worth,or had they just simply become
more fashionable, like New Yorkapartments with exposed brick?
One of the things that thesmartest clubs in world football
are beginning to do is quantifying
the intrinsic value of a player.
This is different to their market
value, which is simply the priceat which buyers and sellers arewilling to meet. The intrinsic valueof a player refers to their actual
performance contribution to theteam, in points terms, and can be30 			

One of the outputs from thealgorithms we at 21st Club havebeen working with is that defensive
players simply are less valuable
than attacking players. Teams
tend to suffer less when theirfirst-choice goalkeeper or centreback is out compared to theirfirst-choice striker, accounting for
all other factors. Attacking players
need to operate their skills on theball in the areas of the field withthe least space and time, andrely slightly more on individual
talent than collective work. It’sno surprise that when a player
moves up a level (or begins to
get old), he tends to move into

As you can imagine, assessing thisis horrifyingly complex. Fortunately,
machine learning algorithms allow
us to handle complex problems
and, without boring you with thedetails, can learn from the resultsof teams to provide an estimate
for the intrinsic value of players –or overall positions - at any given
team.

slightly more defensive roles – thinkof how players like Victor Moses,
Fabian Delph and Trent AlexanderArnold have moved to full-backpositions as they’ve stepped up
into a better team. It’s simply moredifficult to be an attacking player,
especially in central areas.
The Global Sports Salaries Survey
this year details pay by age
brackets and position in each ofEurope’s ‘Big 5’ top divisions, assummarised by the table on thesepages. And we can see that theperformance value of attacking
players is reflected in earnings. The
different leagues have variable
pay levels, with the Premier
League paying most, then La Liga,
Serie A, Bundesliga and Ligue 1.
But across the quintet ofdivisions combined, an average
goalkeeper earns about £1.4
million a year (basic), a defender£1.6 million, a midfielder £2 million
and forward £2.6 million. A surfacelevel observation would suggestthat goalkeepers are indeed
underpaid, given how cheap they
are relative to forwards. However,by combining the insight from ourEnglandPremier League

ALL AGES£2,407,770£2,751,537£3,555,354£3,839,875£3,173,264

Spain

La Liga

ALL AGES£1,514,951£1,479,128£2,066,977£3,090,194£2,037,648

Italy

Serie AALL AGES£1,156,775£1,536,945£1,743,234£2,625,975£1,785,497

Germany

Bundesliga

ALL AGES£1,074,167£1,440,928£1,748,059£1,836,067£1,583,710

FranceLigue 1ALL AGES£863,615£894,835£891,896£1,573,857£1,038,759

performance models with thesepay figures, our analysis suggests
it is attacking players who areundervalued, despite being thebest-paid position.
We analysed the ‘points above
replacement’ value of players
in top-half teams in the big fiveleagues – essentially looking at
how many points worse off anaverage top-half team would
be if they replaced a starting
player with an average player inthe division - and found that an
attacker costs about £2 million
per point above replacement,
compared to roughly £3 million
for a goalkeeper. It is very hardto build a powerful attack on
the cheap, but – as teams like
Getafe and Burnley have shown– it is possible to do so with adefence. On the whole, therefore,
it is justifiable that goalkeepers
and defenders earn less than

midfielders and attackers; this isn’t
a glaring market inefficiency.
The salary data also allows us
to see if certain age groups are
overvalued or undervalued. The
average under-23 player in the
big five leagues costs £1.1 million
a year in basic pay, while 23-29year olds and 30-plus year olds
cost £2 million and £2.5 million
respectively, with significant
positional variation. If we takedefenders, our assessment is thatin the big five leagues the leading
23-29-year olds deliver roughly
the same performance benefit
to a team as the leading 30-plus
year olds, but at about 12 percent
lower cost. This might point to older
players being overvalued, though
clearly experience brings other,less tangible attributes that could
help a team in the long run, suchas leadership.

This remains true across otherpositions – especially as strikers andmidfielders tend to peak younger
than centre-backs - and highlights
the challenges clubs face when
they have players in their late 20s
coming up to contract renewals.
Do they renew at a higher
salary, even though the player isbeginning to pass peak age, orchoose not to, and risk losing theplayer for free?
Ultimately, the goal of virtually
every club in player recruitment is
to identify undervalued individuals– that is, when their performance
benefit is greater than their cost.
Sophisticated analysis can provide
a clue as to whether trends in themarket, such as price inflation forgoalkeepers, will deliver value formoney in the long run.
31

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GLOBAL SPORTS SALARIESSURVEY 2019: TOP 12

13-57
RANK

		
		
		

RANK & TEAMLEAGUE(LAST YEAR)		

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)		

1 (1) Barcelona

La Liga£9,827,644 (£188,993)$12,284,555 ($236,241)		

2 (2) Real Madrid

La Liga£8,923,754 (£171,611)$11,154,692 ($214,513)

		

3 (9) Juventus

Serie A

£8,085,317 (£155,487)$10,106,647 ($194,359)		

4 (14) Portland Trail Blazers

NBA£8,031,862 (£154,459)$10,039,828 ($193,074)		

5 (4) Golden State Warriors

NBA£7,937,513 (£152,644)$9,921,892 ($190,806)		

6 (28) Orlando Magic

NBA£7,580,606 (£145,781)$9,475,757 ($182,226)		

7 (3) Oklahoma City ThunderNBA£7,545,658 (£145,109)$9,432,072 ($181,386)		

8 (24) Denver Nuggets

NBA£7,449,554 (£143,261)$9,311,943 ($179,076)

		

9 (8) Miami Heat

NBA

£7,438,863 (£143,055)$9,298,579 ($178,819)		

10 (16) Cleveland CavaliersNBA£7,365,725 (£141,649)$9,207,157 ($177,061)

		

11 (7) Houston Rockets

NBA£7,328,490 (£140,932)$9,160,612 ($176,166)		

12 (18) PSG

Ligue 1

£7,147,376 (£137,450)$8,934,220 ($171,812)

34 			TEAM

LEAGUE(LAST YEAR)			

		
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57

(20)
(26)
(33)
(5)
(22)
(11)
(12)
(29)
(6)
(15)
(43)
(32)
(21)
(50)
(41)
(37)
(13)
(23)
(25)
(46)
(10)
(54)
(34)
(31)
(19)
(42)
(17)
(36)
(38)
(30)
(48)
(39)
(35)
(91)
(56)
(61)
(55)
(64)
(59)
(52)
(40)
(57)
(53)
(44)
(69)

Man City
LA Clippers
Philadelphia 76ers
Washington Wizards
Detroit PistonsCharlotte Hornets
Minnesota Timberwolves
Milwaukee Bucks
Toronto Raptors
Bayern Munich
Brooklyn Nets
Dallas Mavericks
San Antonio Spurs
Sacramento Kings
Los Angeles Lakers
Phoenix Suns
Boston Celtics
Utah Jazz
New Orleans Pelicans
New York Yankees
Man Utd
Atlanta Hawks
Indiana Pacers
Chicago Bulls
Memphis Grizzlies
New York Knicks
Atletico Madrid
Boston Red Sox
Liverpool
Chicago Cubs
Houston Astros
ArsenalChelsea
Philadelphia Phillies
Mumbai Indians

EPL
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
Bundesliga
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
MLB
EPL
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
NBA
La Liga
MLB
EPL
MLB
MLB
EPL
EPL
MLB
IPL
Royal Challengers Bangalore IPL
Kings XI Punjab
IPL
Chennai Super Kings
IPL
Sunrisers Hyderabad
IPL
Kolkata Knight Riders
IPL
LA AngelsMLB
Rajasthan Royals
IPL
St Louis Cardinals
MLB
Washington Nationals
MLB
EvertonEPL

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

£6,987,500 (£134,375)£6,935,044 (£133,366)£6,897,440 (£132,643)£6,800,264 (£130,774)£6,779,675 (£130,378)£6,625,909 (£127,421)£6,617,213 (£127,254)£6,534,807 (£125,669)£6,520,233 (£125,389)£6,495,917 (£124,921)£6,429,059 (£123,636)£6,333,432 (£121,797)£6,305,720 (£121,264)£6,301,303 (£121,179)£6,286,190 (£120,888)£6,262,365 (£120,430)£6,245,338 (£120,103)£6,191,232 (£119,062)£6,180,056 (£118,847)£6,153,759 (£118,342)£6,125,600 (£117,800)£5,980,159 (£115,003)£5,971,367 (£114,834)£5,958,427 (£114,585)£5,673,155 (£109,099)£5,662,249 (£108,889)£5,631,364 (£108,295)£5,564,455 (£107,009)£5,537,600 (£106,492)£5,115,629 (£98,377)£5,084,841 (£97,785)£4,790,240 (£92,120)£4,774,000 (£91,808)£4,682,528 (£90,049)£4,375,791 (£84,150)£4,347,519 (£83,606)£4,271,113 (£82,137)£4,180,354 (£80,391)£4,167,462 (£80,144)£4,167,117 (£80,137)£4,166,369 (£80,122)£4,160,540 (£80,010)£4,148,306 (£79,775)£4,144,720 (£79,706)£4,101,760 (£78,880)$8,734,375 ($167,969)$8,668,805 ($166,708)$8,621,800 ($165,804)$8,500,330 ($163,468)$8,474,594 ($162,973)$8,282,386 ($159,277)$8,271,517 ($159,068)$8,168,508 ($157,087)$8,150,291 ($156,736)$8,119,896 ($156,152)$8,036,324 ($154,545)$7,916,790 ($152,246)$7,882,150 ($151,580)$7,876,629 ($151,474)$7,857,738 ($151,110)$7,827,956 ($150,538)$7,806,673 ($150,128)$7,739,041 ($148,828)$7,725,070 ($148,559)$7,692,199 ($147,927)$7,657,000 ($147,250)$7,475,199 ($143,754)$7,464,208 ($143,542)$7,448,034 ($143,231)$7,091,444 ($136,374)$7,077,811 ($136,112)$7,039,205 ($135,369)$6,955,569 ($133,761)$6,922,000 ($133,115)$6,394,536 ($122,972)$6,356,051 ($122,232)$5,987,800 ($115,150)$5,967,500 ($114,760)$5,853,160 ($112,561)$5,469,739 ($105,187)$5,434,399 ($104,508)$5,338,891 ($102,671)$5,225,443 ($100,489)$5,209,328 ($100,179)$5,208,896 ($100,171)$5,207,961 ($100,153)$5,200,675 ($100,013)$5,185,383 ($99,719)$5,180,900 ($99,633)$5,127,200 ($98,600)* NB: all IPL annual salaries calculated on a pro rata basis from weekly pay

35sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

58-106107-155TEAM
LEAGUE(LAST YEAR)			

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)RANK(LAST YEAR)			

TEAM

LEAGUE

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

58 (60)59 (47)60 (51)61 (70)62 (66)63 (27)64 (123)65 (105)
66 (63)67 (76)68 (81)69 (62)70 (87)71 (115)72 (78)73 (71)74 (86)75 (93)76 (126)
77 (67)78 (101)79 (68)80 (134)
81 (80)82 (108)
83 (96)84 (74)85 (65)86 (92)87 (97)88 (121)89 (84)90 (45)91 (88)92 (152)
93 (99)94 (85)95 (112)96 (100)
97 (116)98 (107)99 (144)100 (89)
101 (137)
102 (114)
103 (73)104 (75)
105 (129)
106 (120)£4,090,677 (£78,667)£4,085,983 (£78,577)£4,035,461 (£77,605)£3,977,086 (£76,482)£3,961,043 (£76,174)£3,906,440 (£75,124)£3,812,891 (£73,325)£3,764,846 (£72,401)£3,757,200 (£72,254)£3,594,322 (£69,122)£3,352,960 (£64,480)£3,260,031 (£62,693)£3,131,998 (£60,231)£3,127,120 (£60,137)£3,058,862 (£58,824)£3,022,240 (£58,120)£3,000,088 (£57,694)£2,996,257 (£57,620)£2,955,064 (£56,828)£2,919,721 (£56,148)£2,917,696 (£56,110)£2,910,188 (£55,965)£2,907,032 (£55,904)£2,887,500 (£55,529)£2,858,812 (£54,977)£2,775,870 (£53,382)£2,755,434 (£52,989)£2,752,976 (£52,942)£2,708,131 (£52,079)£2,673,665 (£51,417)£2,661,634 (£51,185)£2,654,000 (£51,038)£2,638,382 (£50,738)£2,622,742 (£50,437)£2,618,633 (£50,358)£2,605,349 (£50,103)£2,587,467 (£49,759)£2,566,789 (£49,361)£2,550,080 (£49,040)£2,549,201 (£49,023)£2,542,268 (£48,890)£2,532,659 (£48,705)£2,530,273 (£48,659)£2,525,526 (£48,568)£2,521,090 (£48,483)£2,499,160 (£48,061)£2,499,098 (£48,060)£2,497,385 (£48,027)£2,482,754 (£47,745)$5,113,346 ($98,334)$5,107,479 ($98,221)$5,044,326 ($97,006)$4,971,358 ($95,603)$4,951,304 ($95,217)$4,883,050 ($93,905)$4,766,113 ($91,656)$4,706,057 ($90,501)$4,696,500 ($90,317)$4,492,903 ($86,402)$4,191,200 ($80,600)$4,075,039 ($78,366)$3,914,998 ($75,288)$3,908,900 ($75,171)$3,823,578 ($73,530)$3,777,800 ($72,650)$3,750,110 ($72,118)$3,745,321 ($72,025)$3,693,831 ($71,035)$3,649,651 ($70,186)$3,647,120 ($70,137)$3,637,734 ($69,956)$3,633,790 ($69,881)$3,609,375 ($69,411)$3,573,515 ($68,721)$3,469,837 ($66,728)$3,444,293 ($66,236)$3,441,220 ($66,177)$3,385,163 ($65,099)$3,342,081 ($64,271)$3,327,042 ($63,982)$3,317,500 ($63,798)$3,297,977 ($63,423)$3,278,428 ($63,047)$3,273,291 ($62,948)$3,256,686 ($62,629)$3,234,333 ($62,199)$3,208,486 ($61,702)$3,187,600 ($61,300)$3,186,501 ($61,279)$3,177,835 ($61,112)$3,165,824 ($60,881)$3,162,841 ($60,824)$3,156,908 ($60,710)$3,151,363 ($60,603)$3,123,950 ($60,076)$3,123,873 ($60,074)$3,121,731 ($60,033)$3,103,443 ($59,682)

107 (113)108 (135)
109 (95)
110 (106)111 (90)112 (111)
113 (102)114 (98)
115 (104)
116 (133)
117 (127)
118 (145)
119 (155)
120 (153)
121 (140)
122 (148)
123 (142)
124 (154)
125 (83)
126 (173)
127 (136)
128 (110)129 (94)130 (169)
131 (125)132 (156)133 (159)
134 (138)
135 (119)136 (131)
137 (124)
138 (166)
139 (157)
140 (72)141 (149)
142 (122)
143 (79)144 (-)
145 (117)
146 (174)
147 (172)148 (146)
149 (151)
150 (109)
151 (141)
152 (168)
153 (147)
154 (103)
155 (171)

Colorado Avalanche
Houston Texans
Cincinnati Reds
Buffalo Sabres
Winnipeg Jets
Florida Panthers
Carolina Panthers
Calgary Flames
Chicago Bears
Kansas City Chiefs
New York Giants
Dallas Cowboys
San Diego Padres
New Jersey Devils
Columbus Blue Jackets
Carolina Hurricanes
Baltimore Ravens
Indianapolis ColtsSouthampton
MonacoAnaheim Ducks
Philadelphia Flyers
Chicago White Sox
Oakland Athletics
Washington Redskins
Arizona Coyotes
WolvesDallas Stars
Detroit Red Wings
New York Islanders
Los Angeles Chargers
Newcastle
WatfordArizona Diamondbacks
Chicago Blackhawks
Tampa Bay Lightning
SevillaAston Villa
New York Rangers
RB Leipzig
Lazio
Wolfsburg
Edmonton Oilers
Washington Capitals
Bournemouth
Burnley
Boston Bruins
San Jose Sharks
Lyon

NHL
NFL
MLB
NHL
NHL
NHL
NFL
NHL
NFL
NFL
NFL
NFL
MLB
NHL
NHL
NHL
NFL
NFL
EPL
Ligue 1
NHL
NHL
MLB
MLB
NFL
NHL
EPL
NHL
NHL
NHL
NFL
EPL
EPL
MLB
NHL
NHL
La Liga
EPL
NHL
Bundesliga
Serie A
Bundesliga
NHL
NHL
EPL
EPL
NHL
NHL
Ligue 1

£2,474,417 (£47,585)£2,461,782 (£47,342)£2,459,403 (£47,296)£2,454,000 (£47,192)£2,450,278 (£47,121)£2,444,741 (£47,014)£2,441,242 (£46,947)£2,438,609 (£46,896)£2,405,743 (£46,264)£2,394,393 (£46,046)£2,394,162 (£46,042)£2,379,184 (£45,754)£2,373,096 (£45,636)£2,372,417 (£45,623)£2,335,256 (£44,909)£2,328,727 (£44,783)£2,315,488 (£44,529)£2,310,945 (£44,441)£2,299,440 (£44,220)£2,269,960 (£43,653)£2,260,385 (£43,469)£2,257,913 (£43,421)£2,257,048 (£43,405)£2,212,529 (£42,549)£2,212,154 (£42,541)£2,206,600 (£42,435)£2,197,565 (£42,261)£2,167,000 (£41,673)£2,139,680 (£41,148)£2,113,778 (£40,650)£2,104,538 (£40,472)£2,086,240 (£40,120)£2,025,111 (£38,944)£2,023,288 (£38,909)£2,015,414 (£38,758)£1,979,417 (£38,066)£1,973,490 (£37,952)£1,965,600 (£37,800)£1,935,273 (£37,217)£1,933,091 (£37,175)£1,931,662 (£37,147)£1,928,316 (£37,083)£1,924,214 (£37,004)£1,922,538 (£36,972)£1,917,760 (£36,880)£1,915,333 (£36,833)£1,906,385 (£36,661)£1,899,667 (£36,532)£1,865,323 (£35,872)$3,093,021 ($59,481)$3,077,228 ($59,177)$3,074,254 ($59,120)$3,067,500 ($58,990)$3,062,847 ($58,901)$3,055,926 ($58,768)$3,051,553 ($58,684)$3,048,261 ($58,620)$3,007,179 ($57,830)$2,992,991 ($57,558)$2,992,702 ($57,552)$2,973,979 ($57,192)$2,966,369 ($57,046)$2,965,521 ($57,029)$2,919,070 ($56,136)$2,910,909 ($55,979)$2,894,360 ($55,661)$2,888,681 ($55,552)$2,874,300 ($55,275)$2,837,450 ($54,566)$2,825,481 ($54,336)$2,822,391 ($54,277)$2,821,310 ($54,256)$2,765,661 ($53,186)$2,765,193 ($53,177)$2,758,250 ($53,043)$2,746,957 ($52,826)$2,708,750 ($52,091)$2,674,600 ($51,435)$2,642,222 ($50,812)$2,630,672 ($50,590)$2,607,800 ($50,150)$2,531,389 ($48,681)$2,529,110 ($48,637)$2,519,268 ($48,447)$2,474,271 ($47,582)$2,466,862 ($47,440)$2,457,000 ($47,250)$2,419,091 ($46,521)$2,416,364 ($46,469)$2,414,578 ($46,434)$2,410,395 ($46,354)$2,405,268 ($46,255)$2,403,173 ($46,215)$2,397,200 ($46,100)$2,394,167 ($46,042)$2,382,981 ($45,827)$2,374,583 ($45,665)$2,331,653 ($44,839)

RANK

Delhi Capitals
New York Mets
LA Dodgers
Borussia Dortmund
Tottenham
San Franciso Giants
Atlanta Braves
Atlanta Falcons
Colorado Rockies
Roma
LeicesterInternazionale
Milwaukee Brewers
Philadelphia Eagles
NapoliWest Ham
Minnesota Vikings
Pittsburgh Steelers
New Orleans Saints
Cleveland Indians
Green Bay Packers
Minnesota Twins
New York Jets
Crystal Palace
Detroit Lions
San Francisco 49ers
Texas Rangers
Milan
Tampa Bay Bucs
Tennessee Titans
Oakland Raiders
Minnesota Wild
Seattle Mariners
Pittsburgh Penguins
Buffalo Bills
Denver Broncos
Jacksonville Jaguars
New England Patriots
St Louis Blues
Bayer Leverkusen
Los Angeles Rams
Seattle Seahawks
Nashville Predators
Arizona Cardinals
Cleveland Browns
Detroit Tigers
Valencia
Vegas Golden Knights
Cincinnati Bengals

36 			IPL
MLB
MLB
Bundesliga
EPL
MLB
MLB
NFL
MLB
Serie A
EPL
Serie A
MLB
NFL
Serie A
EPL
NFL
NFL
NFL
MLB
NFL
MLB
NFL
EPL
NFL
NFL
MLB
Serie A
NFL
NFL
NFL
NHL
MLB
NHL
NFL
NFL
NFL
NFL
NHL
Bundesliga
NFL
NFL
NHL
NFL
NFL
MLB
La LigaNHL
NFL

NB: IPL annual salaries are pro rata amounts based on weekly pay

37sportingintelligencesportingintelligence156-204205-254RANKTEAMLEAGUE		

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

(LAST YEAR)			

RANK

TEAM

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

156 (82)
157 (58)
158 (165)
159 (163)160 (161)
161 (77)
162 (130)
163 (150)
164 (158)
165 (164)
166 (139)
167 (132)168 (170)169 (167)
170 (128)171 (143)
172 (49)
173 (177)
174 (180)
175 (162)
176 (183)
177 (118)
178 (235)
179 (178)
180 (194)
181 (186)
182 (175)
183 (197)
184 (196)
185 (185)
186 (176)
187 (188)
188 (211)
189 (189)
190 (179)
191 (187)
192 (198)
193 (200)
194 (190)
195 (201)196 (207)
197 (182)
198 (205)
199 (-)
200 (-)
201 (191)
202 (208)
203 (246)
204 (199)

Los Angeles Kings
Baltimore Orioles
Shanghai SIPG
Guangzhou Evergrande
BrightonKansas City Royals
SchalkeOttawa Senators
Athletic Bilbao
Montreal Canadiens
Miami Marlins
Miami Dolphins
Vancouver Canucks
Hebei China Fortune
Marseille
Tampa Bay Rays
Toronto Blue Jays

£1,864,160 (£35,849)£1,852,334 (£35,622)£1,832,419 (£35,239)£1,823,054 (£35,059)£1,805,304 (£34,717)£1,785,747 (£34,341)£1,748,145 (£33,618)£1,728,815 (£33,246)£1,674,220 (£32,197)£1,671,037 (£32,135)£1,652,869 (£31,786)£1,641,145 (£31,560)£1,617,417 (£31,104)£1,610,425 (£30,970)£1,609,766 (£30,957)£1,580,422 (£30,393)£1,541,140 (£29,637)£1,535,462 (£29,528)£1,458,333 (£28,045)£1,383,633 (£26,608)£1,359,973 (£26,153)£1,352,612 (£26,012)£1,320,105 (£25,387)£1,287,325 (£24,756)£1,258,929 (£24,210)£1,257,790 (£24,188)£1,253,606 (£24,108)£1,252,983 (£24,096)£1,230,655 (£23,666)£1,230,069 (£23,655)£1,214,599 (£23,358)£1,204,427 (£23,162)£1,197,164 (£23,022)£1,194,117 (£22,964)£1,181,752 (£22,726)£1,173,710 (£22,571)£1,156,687 (£22,244)£1,150,452 (£22,124)£1,062,131 (£20,426)£1,036,288 (£19,929)£1,025,492 (£19,721)£1,004,186 (£19,311)£999,504 (£19,221)£991,000 (£19,058)£979,537 (£18,837)£959,325 (£18,449)£915,751 (£17,611)£910,051 (£17,501)£895,564 (£17,222)$2,330,200 ($44,812)$2,315,417 ($44,527)$2,290,524 ($44,049)$2,278,818 ($43,823)$2,256,630 ($43,397)$2,232,184 ($42,927)$2,185,181 ($42,023)$2,161,019 ($41,558)$2,092,775 ($40,246)$2,088,796 ($40,169)$2,066,086 ($39,732)$2,051,431 ($39,451)$2,021,771 ($38,880)$2,013,031 ($38,712)$2,012,208 ($38,696)$1,975,527 ($37,991)$1,926,425 ($37,047)$1,919,327 ($36,910)$1,822,917 ($35,056)$1,729,542 ($33,260)$1,699,966 ($32,692)$1,690,764 ($32,515)$1,650,131 ($31,733)$1,609,156 ($30,945)$1,573,661 ($30,263)$1,572,238 ($30,235)$1,567,008 ($30,135)$1,566,229 ($30,120)$1,538,319 ($29,583)$1,537,586 ($29,569)$1,518,248 ($29,197)$1,505,534 ($28,953)$1,496,455 ($28,778)$1,492,647 ($28,705)$1,477,191 ($28,408)$1,467,138 ($28,214)$1,445,859 ($27,805)$1,438,064 ($27,655)$1,327,664 ($25,532)$1,295,360 ($24,911)$1,281,865 ($24,651)$1,255,233 ($24,139)$1,249,380 ($24,027)$1,238,750 ($23,822)$1,224,422 ($23,547)$1,199,157 ($23,061)$1,144,689 ($22,013)$1,137,564 ($21,876)$1,119,455 ($21,528)

205 (-)
206 (225)
207 (229)
208 (203)
209 (234)
210 (195)
211 (204)212 (209)
213 (202)
214 (241)
215 (-)
216 (216)
217 (223)
218 (215)
219 (220)
220 (226)
221 (221)
222 (230)
223 (227)
224 (243)
225 (-)
226 (233)
227 (213)
228 (222)
229 (214)
230 (239)
231 (212)232 (-)
233 (244)
234 (254)
235 (228)
236 (-)
237 (266)
238 (242)
239 (247)
240 (261)
241 (240)
242 (-)
243 (206)244 (245)
245 (249)
246 (237)
247 (-)
248 (-)
249 (218)
250 (-)
251 (258)
252 (232)
253 (193)
254 (269)

Lecce
Parma
AugsburgSaint-Etienne
SPAL
Beijing Guoan
RennesHanshin Tigers
Leganes
Tianjin Teda
Sheff Utd
LevanteTokyo Yakult Swallows
GetafeMainz
UdineseBordeaux
Hiroshima Toyo Carp

£852,055 (£16,386)£832,738 (£16,014)£813,708 (£15,648)£806,746 (£15,514)£791,667 (£15,224)£789,867 (£15,190)£780,481 (£15,009)£780,389 (£15,007)£757,602 (£14,569)£731,633 (£14,070)£728,000 (£14,000)£700,637 (£13,474)£699,757 (£13,457)£696,906 (£13,402)£681,484 (£13,105)£675,843 (£12,997)£657,031 (£12,635)£651,034 (£12,520)£650,243 (£12,505)£649,771 (£12,496)£645,598 (£12,415)£636,910 (£12,248)£634,282 (£12,198)£613,260 (£11,793)£606,677 (£11,667)£604,020 (£11,616)£593,511 (£11,414)£590,038 (£11,347)£582,394 (£11,200)£544,706 (£10,475)£543,609 (£10,454)£541,123 (£10,406)£533,646 (£10,262)£529,562 (£10,184)£528,078 (£10,155)£523,754 (£10,072)£523,303 (£10,064)£514,593 (£9,896)£510,792 (£9,823)£497,567 (£9,569)£488,999 (£9,404)£487,059 (£9,367)£484,370 (£9,315)£464,744 (£8,937)£426,521 (£8,202)£418,528 (£8,049)£407,999 (£7,846)£406,563 (£7,819)£396,004 (£7,615)£394,013 (£7,577)$1,065,068 ($20,482)$1,040,923 ($20,018)$1,017,136 ($19,560)$1,008,433 ($19,393)$989,583 ($19,030)$987,333 ($18,987)$975,602 ($18,762)$975,487 ($18,759)$947,003 ($18,212)
914,541 ($17,587)$910,000 ($17,500)$875,796 ($16,842)$874,696 ($16,821)$871,133 ($16,753)$851,855 ($16,382)$844,804 ($16,246)$821,288 ($15,794)$813,793 ($15,650)$812,804 ($15,631)$812,213 ($15,619)$806,998 ($15,519)$796,137 ($15,310)$792,852 ($15,247)$766,575 ($14,742)$758,346 ($14,584)$755,025 ($14,520)$741,889 ($14,267)$737,547 ($14,184)$727,992 ($14,000)$680,882 ($13,094)$679,511 ($13,068)$676,404 ($13,008)$667,058 ($12,828)$661,953 ($12,730)$660,097 ($12,694)$654,693 ($12,590)$654,129 ($12,579)$643,241 ($12,370)$638,490 ($12,279)$621,959 ($11,961)$611,249 ($11,755)$608,824 ($11,708)$605,463 ($11,644)$580,929 ($11,172)$533,151 ($10,253)$523,160 ($10,061)$509,998 ($9,808)$508,204 ($9,773)$495,005 ($9,519)$492,516 ($9,471)(LAST YEAR)

NHL
MLB
CSL
CSL
EPL
MLB
Bundesliga
NHL
La Liga
NHL
MLB
NFL
NHL
CSL
Ligue 1MLBMLB
Borussia Monchengladbach Bundesliga
TorinoSerie A
Villarreal
La Liga
Hoffenheim
Bundesliga
Pittsburgh Pirates
MLB
Dalian Yifang
CSL
Celta Vigo
La Liga
Bologna
Serie A
Vissel Kobe
J.League
Real Sociedad
La Liga
Werder Bremen
Bundesliga
Eintracht Frankfurt
Bundesliga
Toronto Maple Leafs
NHL
Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks
NPB
Fiorentina
Serie A
Shanghai Shenua
CSL
Jiangsu Suning
CSL
Real Betis
La Liga
Yomiuri GiantsNPB
Shangdong Luneng
CSL
Cagliari
Serie A
Lille
Ligue 1
Hertha Berlin
Bundesliga
Atalanta
Serie A
Espanyol
La Liga
Genoa
Serie A
NorwichEPL
FC Koln
Bundesliga
Sampdoria
Serie A
Sassuolo
Serie A
Guangzhou
R&F CSL
Celtic
SPL

38 			LEAGUE

Serie A
Serie A
Bundesliga
Ligue 1
Serie A
CSL
Ligue 1NPB
La Liga
CSL
EPL
La LigaNPB
La Liga
Bundesliga
Serie A
Ligue 1
NPB
Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles NPB
Rangers
SPL
GranadaLa Liga
Yokohama DeNA Bay Stars NPB
Eibar
La Liga
Saitama Seibu Lions
NPB
Toronto FC
MLS
Fortuna Dusseldorf
Bundesliga
Nice
Ligue 1
Wuhan Zall
CSL
Freiburg
Bundesliga
Montpellier
Ligue 1
NantesLigue 1
Union Berlin
Bundesliga
Chongqing Lifan
CSL
Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters NPB
Chiba Lotte Marines
NPB
Henan Jianye
CSL
LA Galaxy
MLS
Hellas Verona
Serie A
Alaves
La Liga
Chunichi Dragons
NPB
Chicago Fire
MLS
Toulouse
Ligue 1
Mallorca
La Liga
Brescia
Serie A
Orix BuffaloesNPB
Shenzhen FC
CSL
LAFC
MLS
Valladolid
La Liga
Tianjin Tianhai
CSL
Beijing RenheCSL

39

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

255-302303-350RANKTEAMLEAGUE(LAST YEAR)			

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)TEAM
LEAGUE(LAST YEAR)			

AVG ANNUAL PAY £(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

AVG ANNUAL PAY $(AVG WEEKLY PAY)

255 (251)
256 (260)
257 (253)
258 (271)
259 (-)
260 (267)
261 (262)
262 (319)
263 (279)
264 (-)
265 (265)
266 (270)
267 (282)
268 (252)
269 (275)
270 (268)
271 (257)
272 (283)
273 (272)
274 (264)
275 (255)
276 (-)
277 (290)
278 (291)
279 (-)
280 (281)
281 (276)
282 (273)
283 (274)284 (313)
285 (296)
286 (278)
287 (-)
288 (285)
289 (295)
290 (286)
291 (304)
292 (292)
293 (277)294 (297)
295 (302)
296 (306)
297 (287)
298 (300)
299 (299)
300 (284)
301 (305)
302 (303)£392,968 (£7,557)£390,812 (£7,516)£372,095 (£7,156)£371,968 (£7,153)£362,245 (£6,966)£357,947 (£6,884)£350,727 (£6,745)£344,838 (£6,632)£335,086 (£6,444)£334,998 (£6,442)£332,984 (£6,404)£330,852 (£6,363)£327,945 (£6,307)£327,186 (£6,292)£325,263 (£6,255)£323,928 (£6,229)£320,097 (£6,156)£303,785 (£5,842)£302,082 (£5,809)£300,753 (£5,784)£297,588 (£5,723)£296,843 (£5,709)£292,817 (£5,631)£286,911 (£5,518)£283,354 (£5,449)£273,935 (£5,268)£271,110 (£5,214)£248,710 (£4,783)£245,714 (£4,725)£241,237 (£4,639)£239,143 (£4,599)£238,817 (£4,593)£231,877 (£4,459)£226,340 (£4,353)£217,390 (£4,181)£210,503 (£4,048)£206,662 (£3,974)£206,630 (£3,974)£205,994 (£3,961)£204,806 (£3,939)£204,806 (£3,939)£204,796 (£3,938)£203,381 (£3,911)£203,366 (£3,911)£203,352 (£3,911)£203,249 (£3,909)£202,375 (£3,892)£200,925 (£3,864)$491,210 ($9,446)$488,515 ($9,395)$465,119 ($8,945)$464,960 ($8,942)$452,806 ($8,708)$447,433 ($8,604)$438,409 ($8,431)$431,048 ($8,289)$418,858 ($8,055)$418,748 ($8,053)$416,230 ($8,004)$413,564 ($7,953)$409,932 ($7,883)$408,983 ($7,865)$406,579 ($7,819)$404,910 ($7,787)$400,121 ($7,695)$379,732 ($7,303)$377,603 ($7,262)$375,942 ($7,230)$371,985 ($7,154)$371,054 ($7,136)$366,021 ($7,039)$358,638 ($6,897)$354,193 ($6,811)$342,419 ($6,585)$338,887 ($6,517)$310,888 ($5,979)$307,143 ($5,907)$301,547 ($5,799)$298,929 ($5,749)$298,522 ($5,741)$289,846 ($5,574)$282,925 ($5,441)$271,738 ($5,226)$263,128 ($5,060)$258,328 ($4,968)$258,287 ($4,967)$257,493 ($4,952)$256,008 ($4,923)$256,008 ($4,923)$255,995 ($4,923)$254,226 ($4,889)$254,208 ($4,889)$254,190 ($4,888)$254,062 ($4,886)$252,969 ($4,865)$251,156 ($4,830)

303 (294)
304 (298)
305 (288)
306 (307)307 (293)
308 (301)
309 (289)
310 (308)
311 (311)
312 (280)
313 (310)
314 (315)
315 (309)
316 (320)317 (314)
318 (317)
319 (-)
320 (318)
321 (316)
322 (322)
323 (326)
324 (323)
325 (325)
326 (324)
327 (328)
328 (336)
329 (329)
330 (330)
331 (321)
332 (345)
333 (331)
334 (342)
335 (339)
336 (341)
337 (347)
338 (340)
339 (344)
340 (332)
341 (337)
342 (-)
343 (334)
344 (-)
345 (338)
346 (343)
347 (348)
348 (333)
349 (349)£200,915 (£3,864)£199,475 (£3,836)£199,044 (£3,828)£199,044 (£3,828)£197,996 (£3,808)£197,594 (£3,800)£196,201 (£3,773)£194,512 (£3,741)£171,582 (£3,300)£169,526 (£3,260)£161,665 (£3,109)£161,226 (£3,101)£155,157 (£2,984)£141,774 (£2,726)£140,461 (£2,701)£137,942 (£2,653)£120,209 (£2,312)£119,700 (£2,302)£105,931 (£2,037)£80,735 (£1,553)£74,468 (£1,432)£73,686 (£1,417)£71,410 (£1,373)£71,185 (£1,369)£69,855 (£1,343)£68,412 (£1,316)£68,091 (£1,309)£64,806 (£1,246)£64,463 (£1,240)£62,691 (£1,206)£62,099 (£1,194)£61,120 (£1,175)£60,114 (£1,156)£59,609 (£1,146)£59,304 (£1,140)£59,143 (£1,137)£58,995 (£1,135)£58,123 (£1,118)£56,815 (£1,093)£56,465 (£1,086)£56,405 (£1,085)£55,574 (£1,069)£53,747 (£1,034)£51,429 (£989)£48,621 (£935)£48,048 (£924)£43,105 (£829)$251,143 ($4,830)$249,344 ($4,795)$248,805 ($4,785)$248,805 ($4,785)$247,495 ($4,760)$246,992 ($4,750)$245,251 ($4,716)$243,140 ($4,676)$214,477 ($4,125)$211,907 ($4,075)$202,082 ($3,886)$201,533 ($3,876)$193,946 ($3,730)$177,218 ($3,408)$175,576 ($3,376)$172,428 ($3,316)$150,261 ($2,890)$149,625 ($2,877)$132,413 ($2,546)$100,919 ($1,941)$93,085 ($1,790)$92,107 ($1,771)$89,262 ($1,717)$88,982 ($1,711)$87,319 ($1,679)$85,514 ($1,645)$85,113 ($1,637)$81,008 ($1,558)$80,579 ($1,550)$78,364 ($1,507)$81,709 ($1,571)$80,421 ($1,547)$79,098 ($1,521)$78,433 ($1,508)$74,130 ($1,426)$77,820 ($1,497)$77,624 ($1,493)$76,477 ($1,471)$74,757 ($1,438)$70,581 ($1,357)$74,217 ($1,427)$69,467 ($1,336)$70,720 ($1,360)$67,669 ($1,301)$60,776 ($1,169)$63,221 ($1,216)$53,881 ($1,036)

AngersSeattle Sounders
Strasbourg
Portland Timbers
Osasuna
Urawa Red Diamonds
Montreal Impact
Sagan Tosu
Orlando City
PaderbornSporting Kansas City
Kawasaki Frontale
New England Revolution
Dijon
AmiensAtlanta United
Reims
Minnesota United
DC United
Nagoya Grampus
New York City FC
Metz
Columbus Crew
Real Salt LakeBrest
San Jose Earthquakes
Philadelphia Union
Kashima Antlers
Colorado Rapids
Houston Dynamo
New York Red Bulls
Nimes
FC Cincinnati
FC Dallas
Vancouver Whitecaps
Richmond
West Coast Eagles
Sydney Swans
Cerezo Osaka
Brisbane Lions
St Kilda
CarltonGreater Western Sydney
Port Adelaide
Gold Coast
FC TokyoWestern Bulldogs
Fremantle

40 			

Ligue 1
MLS
Ligue 1MLS
La Liga
J.League
MLS
J.League
MLS
Bundesliga
MLS
J.League
MLS
Ligue 1
Ligue 1
MLS
Ligue 1MLS
MLS
J.League
MLS
Ligue 1MLS
MLS
Ligue 1MLS
MLS
J.League
MLS
MLS
MLS
Ligue 1
MLS
MLS
MLS
AFL
AFL
AFL
J.League
AFL
AFL
AFL
AFL
AFL
AFL
J.League
AFL
AFL

RANK

350 (346)

Collingwood
Hawthorn
Adelaide Crows
Melbourne
Geelong
North Melbourne
EssendonShimizu S-Pulse
Jubilo Iwata
Gamba Osaka
Yokohama F Marinos
Consadole Sapporo
Sanfrecce Hiroshima
Vegalta Sendai
AberdeenHeartsMatsumoto Yamaga
Hibernian
Shonan Bellmare
Calgary Stampeders
Ottawa Redblacks

Saskatchewan Roughriders

Winnipeg Blue Bombers
Edmonton Eskimos
Hamilton Tiger-Cats
Kilmarnock
BC Lions
Montreal Alouettes
Toronto Argonauts
St Johnstone
Phoenix Mercury
Chicago Sky
Atlanta Dream
Washington Mystics
Motherwell
Connecticut Sun
Las Vegas Aces
Los Angeles Sparks
Seattle Storm
Oita Trinita
Minnesota Lynx
Ross County
New York Liberty
Indiana Fever
St Mirren
Dallas Wings
Livingston

Hamilton

AFL
AFL
AFL
AFL
AFL
AFL
AFL
J.League
J.League
J.League
J.League
J.League
J.League
J.LeagueSPL
SPL
J.League
SPL
J.League
CFL
CFL
CFL
CFL
CFL
CFL
SPL
CFL
CFL
CFL
SPL
WNBA
WNBA
WNBA
WNBA
SPL
WNBA
WNBA
WNBA
WNBA
J.League
WNBA
SPL
WNBA
WNBA
SPL
WNBA
SPL

SPL

£41,154 (£791)$51,443 ($989)

41

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

NBA ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, NBA, 2019-20 SEASONNATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

2019202030
TEAMS

PLAYERS440

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£2,929,321,798$3,661,652,248£6,657,550 (UP 12.7% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$8,321,937

No1 LEAGUE£3,200,000$4,000,000

THE STATE OF PLAY

The NBA remains comfortably the best paid sports league in the world by average salary, cementing that status withanother annual hike in wages, this time by 12.7% in a year.

RANK
TEAM
			
1
Portland Trail Blazers
2Golden State Warriors
3
Orlando Magic
4
Oklahoma City Thunder5
Denver Nuggets
6
Miami Heat
7
Cleveland Cavaliers
8
Houston Rockets
9
Los Angeles Clippers
10
Philadelphia 76ers
11
Washington Wizards
12
Detroit Pistons
13
Charlotte Hornets
14
Minnesota Timberwolves
15
Milwaukee Bucks
16
Toronto Raptors
17
Brooklyn Nets
18
Dallas Mavericks
19
San Antonio Spurs
20
Sacramento Kings21
Los Angeles Lakers
22
Phoenix Suns
23
Boston Celtics
24
Utah Jazz
25
New Orleans Pelicans
26
Atlanta Hawks
27
Indiana Pacers
28
Chicago Bulls
29
Memphis Grizzlies
30
New York Knicks

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, ££8,031,862£7,937,513£7,580,606£7,545,658£7,449,554£7,438,863£7,365,725£7,328,490£6,935,044£6,897,440£6,800,264£6,779,675£6,625,909£6,617,213£6,534,807£6,520,233£6,429,059£6,333,432£6,305,720£6,301,303£6,286,190£6,262,365£6,245,338£6,191,232£6,180,056£5,980,159£5,971,367£5,958,427£5,673,155£5,662,249

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER,$		$10,039,828$9,921,892$9,475,757$9,432,072$9,311,943$9,298,579$9,207,157$9,160,612$8,668,805$8,621,800$8,500,330$8,474,594$8,282,386$8,271,517$8,168,508$8,150,291$8,036,324$7,916,790$7,882,150$7,876,629$7,857,738$7,827,956$7,806,673$7,739,041$7,725,070$7,475,199$7,464,208$7,448,034$7,091,444$7,077,811

NBA average pay levels have rocketed since the current 9-year $24 billion TV deals came on stream in 2016-17. Theysoared from $4.6m in 2015-16 to $6.4m a year later, then rose again to $7.1m in 2017-18, again to $7.8m last year,
and now to more than $8.32m a year.
Our NBA figures for 2019-20 include only the 440 ‘full-time’ NBA players on the opening day rosters, and not thetwo-way (TW) players who are effectively the developmental part-timers.
No fewer than 123 of the 440 players will make at least $10m this season for their on-court activity alone, or 28% of
the players.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, then big things should be expected of Portland Trail Blazers, Golden State Warriors, Orlando
Magic and Oklahoma City Thunder to name the top four payers by average salary. The early stage of the season has
thrown doubt on that. More reliable - for most years of the GSSS series at least - is that if an NBA team is amongthe 10 lowest paid teams by our metric, their chances of reaching the post-season are considerably diminishedcompared to other teams.

42 			

43

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

NBA ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMNATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALLos Angeles Lakers

8,155,399

9,960,137

21,583,829

39,699,365

Golden State Warriors

6,382,948

13,201,981

11,695,064

31,279,993

Chicago Bulls

4,113,064

4,776,771

17,651,233

26,541,068

Miami Heat

4,677,528

3,710,653

15,188,432

23,576,613

Houston Rockets

2,972,379

4,344,989

12,974,848

20,292,216

Cleveland Cavaliers

3,255,990

7,451,311

8,537,880

19,245,181

Boston Celtics

3,489,217

4,583,689

8,982,943

17,055,849

Oklahoma City Thunder

2,761,474

4,387,822

7,022,622

14,171,918

San Antonio Spurs

3,471,531

2,866,486

7,017,398

13,355,415

New York Knicks

2,154,511

2,313,686

5,808,330

10,276,527

Sacramento Kings

1,065,005

1,315,785

7,735,945

10,116,735

LA Clippers

1,533,715

2,670,642

3,806,452

8,010,809

Toronto Raptors

2,114,854

2,994,500

2,672,265

7,781,619

Dallas Mavericks

1,632,318

1,412,667

4,364,820

7,409,805

Indiana Pacers

1,228,323

1,684,935

3,233,798

6,147,056

Philadelphia 76ers

1,812,422

2,235,941

1,752,623

5,800,986

Brooklyn Nets

1,055,105

1,826,072

2,734,352

5,615,529

Washington Wizards

1,017,624

1,397,876

3,191,765

5,607,265

Portland Trail Blazers

1,253,838

1,648,030

2,453,147

5,355,015

Milwaukee Bucks

1,130,626

2,341,409

1,843,668

5,315,703

Orlando Magic

1,492,566

1,027,624

2,736,367

5,256,557

Minnesota Timberwolves

968,057

1,696,954

1,882,062

4,547,073

New Orleans Pelicans

1,011,403

1,697,066

1,758,523

4,466,992

Phoenix Suns

1,086,645

1,269,761

1,878,933

4,235,339

Atlanta Hawks

1,253,734

1,177,581

1,607,529

4,038,844

Denver Nuggets

926,393

1,082,183

2,003,609

4,012,185Charlotte Hornets

957,488

1,139,120

1,733,481

3,830,089

Detroit Pistons

925,622

1,042,112

1,848,071

3,815,805

Memphis Grizzlies

1,052,319

896,5481,800,241

3,749,108

Utah Jazz

952,978

914,880

1,805,671

3,673,529

Data: mid-November 201944 			SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The four most successful all-time NBA teams are among the top seven in current global popularity: Celtics, Lakers,
Warriors, Bulls. The others in that top seven are either multiple NBA finals winners (Heat, Rockets) or employed
LeBron James (Cavaliers).
ii: It requires all those top seven teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. This points to a spread of on-court contenders.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Trail Blazers) and the lowest payers (Knicks) is 1.42 to 1, a
relatively low figure and an indication of decent balance.
iv: The top 10% of NBA earners this season make 36.6% of all basic pay. Only three other leagues in this study areless ‘top heavy’ in this regard, and therefore more balanced or ’fairer’.

45sportingintelligencesportingintelligence

IPL ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, IPL, 2019 SEASONINDIAN PREMIER LEAGUE

2019

8

TEAMS

PLAYERS128

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£72,715,080$90,893,850£81,155 PER WEEK(ANNUAL PRO RATA = £4.22M, UP 9.8%)$101,444 PER WEEK

RANK
TEAM
			
1
Mumbai Indians

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, ££589,049

2£585,243

Royal Challengers Bangalore

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $$736,311$731,554

3

Kings XI Punjab£574,958$718,697

4

Chennai Super Kings£562,740$703,425

5Sunrisers Hyderabad£561,005$701,256

6

Kolkata Knight Riders£560,958$701,198

7

Rajasthan Royals£560,073$700,091

8

Delhi Capitals£550,668$688,335

No2 LEAGUE£57,960 PER WEEK
$72,450 PER WEEK(ANNUAL PRO RATA = $5.3M)
THE STATE OF PLAY

A wage trend notable between 2017 and last year is repeated again this time, with salaries getting bigger per man(up 9.8% on average) at the same time as the gap in pay between teams has got even smaller. Pro-rated averageannual salaries rose from $3.9m in 2017 to just more than $5m last year, a leap of 29.8 per cent, with another hikethis time. That is no doubt related to the fact that the team owners are now making more money and are passing
some of it on.
Uniquely in the GSSS, IPL salaries are pro-rated from weekly pay to annual pay because, again uniquely, IPL players
typically have multiple different professional employers concurrently. The vast majority of other teams in otherleagues contract their players for at least a year at a time. You simply don’t get NFL stars playing a season in the USAthen another in Germany in the same year; or a Premier League player appearing freelance for six different teams ina campaign, as some IPL players do.

THE MONEY TALK

There’s barely any difference in pay levels now across teams, but if the money talked purely on the basis of best paidteam to the worst paid, we’d have expected Mumbai Indians to win the IPL in 2019 (and they did), with Bangalorerunners-up (they were eighth), with Kings XI Punjab third best (actually 6th) and Chennai Super Kings fourth best
(actually runners-up).

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IPL ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAM

INDIAN PREMIER LEAGUESUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOK

TOTAL

Mumbai Indians

5,351,264

3,700,000

13,302,189

22,353,453

Kolkata Knight Riders

4,244,886

1,300,000

16,476,130

22,021,016

Chennai Super Kings

5,149,001

3,500,000

12,510,199

21,159,200

Royal Challengers Bangalore

3,563,434

3,000,000

9,296,217

15,859,651

Kings XI Punjab

2,024,950

1,000,000

8,623,115

11,648,065

Sunrisers Hyderabad

2,161,548

1,200,000

5,973,151

9,334,699

Delhi Capitals

1,447,461

1,000,000

5,206,757

7,654,218

Rajasthan Royals

1,207,192

736,000

4,187,321

6,130,513

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The four most successful IPL teams in its 12-season history (Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Bangalore) also fill the
top four in current global popularity.
ii: It requires just those first three teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. But in this eight-team league, there is no dominating elite group.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Mumbai) and the lowest payers (Delhi) is 1.07 to 1, the lowest
ratio of any league in this GSSS. All teams are effectively spending the same.
iv: The top 10% of IPL earners this season make 28.7% of all basic pay. The other league in this GSSS which is moreegalitarian in this regard is the WNBA.

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MLB ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, MLB, 2019 SEASONMAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

2019

30
TEAMS

PLAYERS856

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£2,760,804,686$3,451,005,858£3,225,239 (DOWN 5.95% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$4,031,549

No3 LEAGUE£724,000$905,000

THE STATE OF PLAY

Major League Baseball players saw a tiny rise in pay between 2017 and 2018, indicating a financial slowdown that has
been realised with a drop in pay by almost six per cent on average this year. Median pay also drops this time, but thismay be more to do with a quirk in data compilation, with fewer players part of the 2019 opening day data set (856) thanlast year (877). MLB retains its place as No3 in the list of best paid leagues (by average pay), although this might not be
the case for much longer, given the relentless wage growth in the Premier League just behind.

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

£6,153,759£5,564,455£5,115,629£5,084,841£4,682,528£4,166,369£4,148,306£4,144,720£4,085,983£4,035,461£3,906,440£3,812,891£3,757,200£3,131,998£2,919,721£2,910,188£2,755,434£2,638,382£2,499,160£2,459,403£2,373,096£2,257,048£2,212,529£2,023,288£1,852,334£1,785,747£1,652,869£1,580,422£1,541,140£1,352,612

New York Yankees
Boston Red Sox
Chicago Cubs
Houston Astros
Philadelphia Phillies
Los Angeles Angels
St. Louis Cardinals
Washington Nationals
New York Mets
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Francisco Giants
Atlanta Braves
Colorado Rockies
Milwaukee Brewers
Cleveland Indians
Minnesota Twins
Texas Rangers
Seattle Mariners
Detroit Tigers
Cincinnati Reds
San Diego Padres
Chicago White Sox
Oakland Athletics
Arizona Diamondbacks
Baltimore Orioles
Kansas City Royals
Miami Marlins
Tampa Bay Rays
Toronto Blue Jays
Pittsburgh Pirates

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		
$7,692,199$6,955,569$6,394,536$6,356,051$5,853,160$5,207,961$5,185,383$5,180,900$5,107,479$5,044,326$4,883,050$4,766,113$4,696,500$3,914,998$3,649,651$3,637,734$3,444,293$3,297,977$3,123,950$3,074,254$2,966,369$2,821,310$2,765,661$2,529,110$2,315,417$2,232,184$2,066,086$1,975,527$1,926,425$1,690,764

The highest placed MLB team last year in the overall GSSS list were the San Francisco Giants at No27. This year it’s the
New York Yankees at No32. The Yankees’ place in the GSSS lists in some ways provides a barometer for MLB’s relative
declining fortunes. In every GSSS before 2017, the Yankees were inside the top 10, from No1 in the inaugural study
in 2010 to No3 the following year, No6 in 2012, then No5, No2, No9 and No2 in 2016. They fell to No31 in 2017 andthen to No46 last year.
Until last year, MLB still had more individual players earning $10m+ each than any sports league, at 134 of them. That
figure has fallen to 118 this year, while the NBA has 123 players earning $10m+ each and the NFL has 140 of them.

THE MONEY TALK

If money alone talked, we would have expected the Yankees to win the World Series, after serious competition fromthe Red Sox, Cubs and Astros. At the other extreme we’d have expected the Pirates, Blue Jays, Rays and Marlins totank. The Yankees won the American League East, where the Red Sox were third, missing out on the post-season,as did the Cubs, while the Astros were World Series’ runners-up. A mixed bag, then. The Marlins and Pirates had
terrible years while the Blue Jays did a bit better, but were second bottom of their league. The Rays reached theDivision Series.
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MLB ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAM

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKNew York Yankees

3,456,551

2,493,077

8,558,092

14,507,720

Boston Red Sox

2,138,982

1,796,215

5,274,662

9,209,859

LA Dodgers

2,179,027

2,131,897

3,422,590

7,733,514

Chicago Cubs

2,580,173

1,563,001

3,450,038

7,593,212

San Franciso Giants

1,776,497

1,195,649

2,989,753

5,961,899

Toronto Blue Jays

2,262,768

1,234,828

1,733,735

5,231,331

Atlanta Braves

1,313,068

1,028,853

2,256,785

4,598,706

St Louis Cardinals

1,248,795

834,7932,410,630

4,494,218

Detroit Tigers

1,458,223

692,188

2,337,033

4,487,444

Texas Rangers

1,437,434

592,816

2,330,295

4,360,545

Philadelphia Phillies

1,852,945

689,954

1,694,015

4,236,914

Houston Astros

1,565,248

1,114,734

1,422,292

4,102,274

New York Mets

1,080,199

877,975

1,522,462

3,480,636

LA Angels

1,106,436

783,716

1,331,823

3,221,975

Kansas City Royals

1,061,179

772,503

1,257,268

3,090,950

Cleveland Indians

1,070,504

546,091

1,363,084

2,979,679

Chicago White Sox

923,908375,340

1,652,032

2,951,280

Pittsburgh Pirates

753,274

620,469

1,185,042

2,558,785

Cincinnati Reds

857,219424,695

1,255,627

2,537,541

Baltimore Orioles

794,208

411,434

1,251,286

2,456,928

Seattle Mariners

567,383

610,259

1,231,186

2,408,828

Minnesota Twins

644,242382,220

1,216,895

2,243,357

Milwaukee Brewers

627,429443,770

1,112,807

2,184,006

Washington Nationals

760,587594,711

730,9172,086,215

Colorado Rockies

579,273

410,302931,686

1,921,261

Oakland Athletics

567,033

377,313814,154

1,758,500

Arizona Diamondbacks

589,123

344,226

774,293

1,707,642

Tampa Bay Rays

564,384

301,333

729,443

1,595,160

San Diego Padres

414,515405,313752,859

1,572,687

Miami Marlins

343,871472,047

722,241

1,538,159

Data: mid-November 201952 			TOTAL

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: Seven of the 10 most successful all-time MLB teams are among the top 10 MLB teams in current global popularity,
headed by the Yankees. The three that aren’t (Oakland As, Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates) last won the WS
respectively in 1989, 1990 and 1979.
ii: It requires as many as nine teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. This points to a spread of regular contenders.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers (the Yankees) and the lowest payers (the Pirates) is 4.55 to 1, the biggest
ratio of any North American league. Teams deploy starkly different resources.
iv: The top 10% of MLB earners this season make 46.6% of all basic pay. Ten other leagues in this GSSS are less ‘top
heavy’ in this regard, and therefore more balanced or ’fairer’; seven are more top heavy.

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EPL ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, PREMIER LEAGUE, 2019-20

ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE FOOTBALL

20192020

20
TEAMS

PLAYERS

496

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£1,573,939,000$1,967,423,750£3,173,264 (UP BY 6.1%, YEAR-ON-YEAR)$3,966,580

No4 LEAGUE£2,340,000$2,925,000

RANK
TEAM
			
1
Man City
2
Man Utd3
Liverpool
4
Arsenal5
Chelsea6Everton7
Tottenham
8
Leicester
9
West Ham
10
Crystal Palace
11
Southampton
12
Wolves13
Newcastle
14
Watford15
Aston Villa
16
Bournemouth
17
Burnley
18
Brighton
19
Norwich20
Sheff Utd

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, ££6,987,500£6,125,600£5,537,600£4,790,240£4,774,000£4,101,760£3,961,043£3,352,960£3,022,240£2,887,500£2,299,440£2,197,565£2,086,240£2,025,111£1,965,600£1,917,760£1,915,333£1,805,304£991,000£728,000

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $$8,734,375$7,657,000$6,922,000$5,987,800$5,967,500$5,127,200$4,951,304$4,191,200$3,777,800$3,609,375$2,874,300$2,746,957$2,607,800$2,531,389$2,457,000$2,397,200$2,394,167$2,256,630$1,238,750$910,000

THE STATE OF PLAY

The Premier League’s status as the world’s wealthiest football league endures. The 20 clubs who competed in the 2018-19
season split ‘central revenues’ of £2.46bn in May at an average £122.8m each, and this will rise. For the 2019-20 season, the
20 clubs are earning £349.1m between them just for the names of their principal shirt sponsors on their jerseys. Sleeve deals,
training complex sponsorship and (non-shirt) betting partners keep bringing yet more cash. And that is before a ticket, pie orreplica kit is sold.
The 20 clubs who comprise the cast for this season spent £1.4 billion gross on new players in the summer window alone.
Our survey meanwhile indicates average basic pay is up by more than six per cent year-on-year, and there are a few notabledevelopments.
We calculate that Manchester City’s average basic first-team pay (at almost £7m) has risen about Manchester United’s(£6.1m), with Liverpool in third followed by Arsenal and Chelsea. We think it can reasonably be expected that when the 201920 club accounts are published around a year from now, City’s total club wage bill will (just) have overtaken United’s.
Also notable is we calculate Everton’s average basic first-team pay has now overtaken that of Tottenham. At the other end of
the scale, Sheffield United have the lowest average first-team basic pay at any Premier League club for several years, while
fellow promoted club Norwich are not so far ahead of them. And then a clutch of clubs - Brighton, Burnley, Bournemouth,
Villa, Watford and Newcastle - each have roughly double Norwich’s figure, with figures ranging from £1.8m to £2.2m.

THE MONEY TALK

If money alone talks, then Manchester City would be wrapping up a third straight title ahead of local rivals United, with
Liverpool third, then Arsenal, Chelsea and … Everton. Sheffield United, Norwich and Brighton would be heading down.
Correlation between wage spending and finishing position has been strong across all of Europe’s elite leagues for years,
especially in England. This season it seems likely that disfunction at multiple ‘big’ clubs will be highlighted by finishingpositions below expectation, while excellence on relatively small budgets will be highlighted elsewhere.
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EPL ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALMan Utd

20,519,033

32,182,041

73,278,177

125,979,251

Chelsea

13,552,702

19,422,288

48,112,961

81,087,951

Liverpool

12,878,231

20,929,798

35,381,750

69,189,779

Arsenal15,173,913

16,163,545

37,742,062

69,079,520

Man City

7,381,914

15,921,795

38,185,830

61,489,539

Tottenham

3,841,956

6,196,544

12,331,544

22,370,044

Leicester

1,434,812

3,390,646

6,626,796

11,452,254

Everton1,952,053

1,364,219

3,161,605

6,477,877

Southampton

1,140,755

654,535

3,048,204

4,843,494

West Ham

1,530,176

982,123

2,320,391

4,832,690

Aston Villa

1,294,067

471,470

2,981,880

4,747,417

Newcastle

1,452,431

355,506

2,188,845

3,996,782

Crystal Palace

893,439758,691

1,136,314

2,788,444

Watford638,193556,939

1,124,428

2,319,560

Wolves496,685

637,812

1,107,706

2,242,203

Norwich673,608

191,332

842,646

1,707,586

Bournemouth

479,546469,262

407,024

1,355,832

Burnley

443,304

277,120422,180

1,142,604

Brighton

252,534

245,488276,234

774,256

Sheff Utd

280,359

142,843

203,428

626,630

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The five most popular English football teams in current global popularity are all among the eight most successful
all-time English football teams (in league titles): Man Utd, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Man City. Recency bias
aids Chelsea and Man City in this regard. Everton, Aston Villa and Sunderland are the “other three” from those eight.
ii: It requires as few as three teams combined in social media numbers (Man Utd, Chelsea and Liverpool) to amass
more than half the league’s total popularity. These are clearly ‘big’ global clubs, but so are Arsenal and Manchester
City, and to a lesser extent, Tottenham. This suggests there are (or have been) as many as six realistic contenders for
the Premier League in recent times. Which is considerably more than in any other major European league in the same
period.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers (Man City) and the lowest payers (Sheff Utd) is 9.6 to 1, a PL ratio rising for athird straight year but still much lower than any other ‘Big 5’ European division.
iv: The top 10% of EPL earners this season make 26.9% of all basic pay. This makes the Premier League the most“balanced” of the nine football leagues in this GSSS, most of which (5/9) have skewed payrolls with the top 10% of
players making more than half of all the money.

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NFL ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, NFL, 2019-20 SEASONRANKNATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE

20192020

32
TEAMS

PLAYERS

1,696

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£4,419,644,798$5,524,555,998£2,605,923 (UP BY 17.7% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$3,257,403

No5 LEAGUE£982,442$1,228,053

THE STATE OF PLAY

NFL average pay climbed a whopping 17.7 per cent from 2018 to 2019, to just over £2.6m ($3.26m). The NFL remains
ahead of every league in the world by total wage spend, at more than £4.4bn ($5.5bn) in basic pay for the active rosters,
but that is divided among 1,696 players.
On the field, the season reached mid-December with the Baltimore Ravens as the unlikely 2020 Super Bowl favourites, followed in the betting at that point by the San Francisco 49ers, then the New England Patriots and the New Orleans Saints.
The 2019-20 season is the 100th season of the NFL and will conclude at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami on 2 February
2020. Super Bowl remains - by many country miles - the biggest single event in the USA’s annual sporting calendar. Of
the 20 most-watched events on American television, ever, from any genre of programming, 19 of them have been Super
Bowls, headed by the 2015 Super Bowl, watched by an average TV audience in the USA alone by 114.4m people.
The only non-Super Bowl programme in the all-time top 20 is the final episode of M*A*S*H, broadcast in 1983. A 30-second commercial slot cost advertisers $450,000 during that episode, which is equivalent to around $1.16m today. That wasmore than 1983 Super Bowl ads cost.

TEAM

			
1
Atlanta Falcons
2
Philadelphia Eagles
3
Minnesota Vikings
4
Pittsburgh Steelers
5
New Orleans Saints
6
Green Bay Packers
7
New York Jets
8
Detroit Lions9
San Francisco 49ers
10
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
11
Tennessee Titans
12
Oakland Raiders
13
Buffalo Bills
14
Denver Broncos
15
Jacksonville Jaguars
16
New England Patriots
17
Los Angeles Rams
18
Seattle Seahawks
19
Arizona Cardinals
20
Cleveland Browns
21
Cincinnati Bengals
22
Houston Texans
23
Carolina Panthers
24
Chicago Bears
25
Kansas City Chiefs
26
New York Giants
27
Dallas Cowboys
28
Baltimore Ravens
29
Indianapolis Colts
30
Washington Redskins
31
Los Angeles Chargers
32
Miami Dolphins

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, ££3,764,846£3,127,120£3,000,088£2,996,257£2,955,064£2,917,696£2,907,032£2,858,812£2,775,870£2,708,131£2,673,665£2,661,634£2,618,633£2,605,349£2,587,467£2,566,789£2,542,268£2,532,659£2,525,526£2,521,090£2,482,754£2,461,782£2,441,242£2,405,743£2,394,393£2,394,162£2,379,184£2,315,488£2,310,945£2,212,154£2,104,538£1,641,145

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		
$4,706,057$3,908,900$3,750,110$3,745,321$3,693,831$3,647,120$3,633,790$3,573,515$3,469,837$3,385,163$3,342,081$3,327,042$3,273,291$3,256,686$3,234,333$3,208,486$3,177,835$3,165,824$3,156,908$3,151,363$3,103,443$3,077,228$3,051,553$3,007,179$2,992,991$2,992,702$2,973,979$2,894,360$2,888,681$2,765,193$2,630,672$2,051,431

But. In November 2019, FOX TV announced it had already sold its entire in-game advertising inventory for the 2020 Super
Bowl, for between $5m and $5.6m per 30-second block.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talked then the major contenders would have been the Falcons, Eagles, Vikings, Steelers, Saints, Packers andJets - the seven teams with average basic pay of more than $3.6m. After 14 rounds of games, four of those seven best
paid teams had winning records.
Conversely one might have expected lesser challenges from the five teams with average pay lower than $2.9m: the Dolphins, Chargers, Redskins, Colts and Ravens. After 14 rounds of games, the Dolphins and Chargers were bottom of theirdivisions. The Redskins and Colts were both second bottom. And the Ravens - and their quarterback Lamar Jackson - were
having unexpectedly brilliant seasons. So it was a mixed bag, as is often the case in a league where the chaos of relative
fairness is so often evident.
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NFL ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMNATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUESUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTAL

Dallas Cowboys

3,731,020

3,200,000

8,703,434

15,634,454

New England Patriots

4,279,333

4,100,000

7,084,705

15,464,038

Pittsburgh Steelers

3,328,566

2,300,000

6,502,905

12,131,471

Green Bay Packers

2,211,149

1,800,000

5,308,154

9,319,303

Seattle Seahawks

2,322,784

2,300,000

3,998,992

8,621,776

Denver Broncos

2,640,854

1,200,000

4,447,187

8,288,041

Philadelphia Eagles

3,246,958

1,900,000

3,028,067

8,175,025

San Francisco 49ers

2,039,539

1,700,000

4,242,686

7,982,225

New York Giants

1,795,192

1,900,000

3,930,670

7,625,862

Carolina Panthers

2,954,992

1,600,000

2,385,607

6,940,599

Chicago Bears

1,660,564

1,100,000

4,133,491

6,894,055

New Orleans Saints

1,306,348

1,400,000

4,077,010

6,783,358

Oakland Raiders

1,549,318

1,500,000

3,268,895

6,318,213

Houston Texans

1,816,579

1,200,000

2,166,753

5,183,332

Atlanta Falcons

2,309,113

1,000,000

1,843,418

5,152,531

Baltimore Ravens

1,441,607

1,000,000

2,350,971

4,792,578

Minnesota Vikings

1,237,635

911,000

2,091,594

4,240,229

Miami Dolphins972,683

964,000

2,186,300

4,122,983

Washington Redskins

1,255,961

725,000

1,969,323

3,950,284

New York Jets

1,227,116

697,000

2,006,794

3,930,910

Indianapolis Colts

980,942643,000

2,279,229

3,903,171

Detroit Lions

1,323,124

675,000

1,896,081

3,894,205

Kansas City Chiefs

1,135,475

1,000,000

1,503,998

3,639,473

Cleveland Browns

1,025,663

1,100,000

1,262,305

3,387,968

Los Angeles Chargers

807,747

647,000

1,701,744

3,156,491

Arizona Cardinals

910,227

728,000

1,403,570

3,041,797

Los Angeles Rams

738,629940,000

790,8202,469,449

Cincinnati Bengals

806,578

441,000

1,198,379

2,445,957

Buffalo Bills

945,936

596,000

846,970

2,388,906

Tampa Bay Bucs

747,847

438,000

924,127

2,109,974

Tennessee Titans

714,312470,000

918,014

2,102,326

Jacksonville Jaguars

627,381494,000

590,725

1,712,106

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The seven most successful all-time NFL teams - those who have each won four or more Super Bowls - are allamong the top nine in current global popularity: the Patriots, Steelers, Cowboys, Broncos, 49ers, Packers and Giants.
The Seahawks and Eagles are the two punching above their weight.
ii: It requires as many as 10 teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. This points to a spread of contenders, and competitive balance.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Falcons) and the lowest payers (Dolphins) is 2.29 to 1, a
relatively small figure and an indication of competitive balance.
iv: The top 10% of NFL earners make 47.6% of all basic pay. This indicates a ‘star system’ where a few huge earners
make much of the money in squads where most earn below average salaries.

Data: mid-November 201960 			

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NHL ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, NHL, 2019-20 SEASONNATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE

20192020

31
TEAMS

PLAYERS770

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£1,655,914,607$2,069,893,259£2,150,538 (UP BY 1.7% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$2,688,173

No6 LEAGUE£1,500,000$1,875,000

THE STATE OF PLAY

The 2019-20 season is the 102nd in NHL playing history and involves 31 teams competing in an 82-game regular season
between 2 October 2019 and 4 April 2020. The Stanley Cup finals will he held from late May 2020. For sports trivia fans,the cup is named after Frederick Stanley, aka Lord Stanley of Preston, a 19th-century London-born British Conservative
Party politician. His work for the empire included being the sixth Governor General of Canada between 1888 and 1893.

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31

£2,654,000£2,622,742£2,550,080£2,530,273£2,497,385£2,474,417£2,454,000£2,450,278£2,444,741£2,438,609£2,372,417£2,335,256£2,328,727£2,260,385£2,257,913£2,206,600£2,167,000£2,139,680£2,113,778£2,015,414£1,979,417£1,935,273£1,924,214£1,922,538£1,906,385£1,899,667£1,864,160£1,728,815£1,671,037£1,617,417£1,230,069

Minnesota Wild
Pittsburgh Penguins
St Louis Blues
Nashville Predators
Vegas Golden Knights
Colorado Avalanche
Buffalo Sabres
Winnipeg Jets
Florida Panthers
Calgary Flames
New Jersey Devils
Columbus Blue Jackets
Carolina Hurricanes
Anaheim Ducks
Philadelphia Flyers
Arizona Coyotes
Dallas Stars
Detroit Red Wings
New York Islanders
Chicago Blackhawks
Tampa Bay Lightning
New York Rangers
Edmonton Oilers
Washington Capitals
Boston Bruins
San Jose Sharks
Los Angeles Kings
Ottawa Senators
Montreal Canadiens
Vancouver Canucks
Toronto Maple Leafs

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $$3,317,500$3,278,428$3,187,600$3,162,841$3,121,731$3,093,021$3,067,500$3,062,847$3,055,926$3,048,261$2,965,521$2,919,070$2,910,909$2,825,481$2,822,391$2,758,250$2,708,750$2,674,600$2,642,222$2,519,268$2,474,271$2,419,091$2,405,268$2,403,173$2,382,981$2,374,583$2,330,200$2,161,019$2,088,796$2,021,771$1,537,586

While there his sons fell in love with ice hockey. The trophy, which is now absolutely massive (as a quick Google images
search will show you) was originally commissioned by Stanley in 1892 as the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup, and cost
10 guineas from a London trophy-maker. The original was just a bowl. The modern-day version, the Presentation Cup, is a
replica of the bowl and sits atop a giant cylinder. Three babies have been baptised in the current cup: Colorado Avalanche
defender Sylvain Lefebvre’s daughter; the daughter of the cousin of the Detroit Red Wings winger Tomas Holmström; andthe son of the Pittsburgh Penguins forward Josh Archibald.
In June this year the National Hockey League Players’ Association announced the 2019-20 salary cap at $81.5m per teamfor 2019-20 and we continue to be grateful for them for the official salary data used to compile the NHL numbers for thisreport. In the USA, only in football (soccer, via the MLS Players’ Union) and in ice hockey are detailed salary numbers foreach player formally and officially declared.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, then we might expect Minnesota Wild, Pittsburgh Penguins, St Louis Blues and Nashville Predators
to be major contenders. At the other extreme, we might expect a quartet of Canadian teams to struggle: Ottawa
Senators, Montreal Canadiens, Vancouver Canucks and Toronto Maple Leafs. By mid-December those forecasts werelooking like a mixed bag.

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NHL ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMNATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUESUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALChicago Blackhawks

2,485,818

1,340,044

2,845,714

6,671,576

Pittsburgh Penguins

1,852,564

1,451,717

2,049,346

5,353,627

Boston Bruins

1,512,223

1,262,593

2,201,619

4,976,435

Toronto Maple Leafs

1,902,050

1,016,940

1,376,645

4,295,635

Detroit Red Wings

1,244,656

743,2142,016,431

4,004,301

New York Rangers

1,454,472

966,649

1,528,077

3,949,198

Montreal Canadiens

1,490,790

644,678

1,636,008

3,771,476

Philadelphia Flyers

1,577,081

568,620

1,172,991

3,318,692

Los Angeles Kings

1,206,001

612,175

961,889

2,780,065

Vancouver Canucks

1,055,214

442,991

1,027,781

2,525,986

Washington Capitals

765,535

757,477

802,376

2,325,388

San Jose Sharks

821,810509,178

949,599

2,280,587

St Louis Blues

736,038

579,629

764,179

2,079,846

Edmonton Oilers

817,828

586,234

581,609

1,985,671

Dallas Stars

1,072,134

418,449

483,116

1,973,699

Tampa Bay Lightning

702,648518,380

563,611

1,784,639

Minnesota Wild

691,602412,598

650,371

1,754,571

Buffalo Sabres

862,137

360,891

502,937

1,725,965

Colorado Avalanche

507,100

417,683

762,277

1,687,060

New Jersey Devils

737,509311,256

477,909

1,526,674

Vegas Golden Knights

456,633

657,938

354,188

1,468,759

Nashville Predators

608,056

386,927

409,614

1,404,597

Calgary Flames

623,279

380,188384,071

1,387,538

Anaheim Ducks

603,219

356,786

421,486

1,381,491

Winnipeg Jets

551,397

403,824

394,997

1,350,218

Ottawa Senators

582,122286,780

333,906

1,202,808

New York Islanders

530,866

322,641

303,526

1,157,033

Columbus Blue Jackets

477,329

346,860

317,506

1,141,695

Carolina Hurricanes

425,391309,296

287,949

1,022,636

Arizona Coyotes

364,959

257,477

300,573923,009

Florida Panthers

375,893232,053

198,041805,987

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: Seven of the eight most successful all-time Stanley Cup teams are the top seven in current global NHL popularity:
the Canadiens, Maple Leafs, Red Wings, Bruins, Blackhawks, Penguins and Rangers. Only five-times winners
Edmonton Oilers (14th of 31 in the social table) are missing.
ii: It requires as many as nine teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. This points to a spread of contenders and competitive balance.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Minnesota) and the lowest payers (Toronto) is 2.16 to 1, a
relatively low figure. Only five leagues in this report are more balanced and ‘fairer’.
iv: The top 10% of NHL earners make 26.9% of all basic pay. Only the WNBA has a lower figure in this regard,
pointing to a relatively fair distribution of salaries.

Data: mid-November 201964 			

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LA LIGA ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, LA LIGA, 2019-20 SEASONSPANISH TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

20192020

20TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:£1,002,523,049$1,253,153,811
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£2,037,648 (DOWN BY 7.4% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$2,547,061

PLAYERS

492

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No7 LEAGUEMEDIAN SALARY:£786,964$983,705

THE STATE OF PLAY

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1Barcelona£9,827,644$12,284,555

2

Real Madrid£8,923,754$11,154,693

3

Atletico Madrid£5,631,364$7,039,205

4

Valencia£2,499,098$3,123,873

5Sevilla£1,973,490$2,466,863

6Athletic Bilbao£1,674,220$2,092,775

7Villarreal£1,383,633$1,729,541

8

Celta Vigo

£1,287,325$1,609,156

9Real Sociedad£1,253,606$1,567,008

10Real Betis£1,181,752$1,477,190

11Espanyol£1,004,186$1,255,233

12

Leganes£757,602$947,003

13

Levante£700,637$875,796

14

Getafe£696,906$871,133

15

Granada£645,598$806,998

16

Eibar

£634,282$792,853

17

Alaves£510,792$638,490

18

Mallorca£484,370$605,463

19

Valladolid£406,563$508,204

20

Osasuna£362,245$452,806

Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, insists he is not obsessed with the English Premier League but as the 2019-20
season unfolded he made no secret (yet again) of his ambition to make La Liga the most popular football league in theworld. In doing so, he effectively acknowledged the Premier League currently holds that title. At the heart of the PL’s
popularity is a global TV allure and the riches that brings, as outlined earlier in this report. A feature of this La Liga season
already has been a battle between Tebas and the Spanish FA (the RFEF) over how many different days games should bespread across each week. Tebas wants more days and more time movement to reach foreign audiences. RFEF want less.
“Of the two clásicos there are in a season, one should always be so people in Asia can watch without being asleep and theother should always be so people in the US can watch without being asleep,” he told The Guardian in November.
“It is important to recognise that the followers of Spanish football are not just people who live in Spain. We must also
respect the fans who are in Asia and the Americas – they are also contributing because they pay for their TV subscriptions,which in turn allows the clubs to pay big stars and helps turns La Liga into a global product.”
He forecast that audience numbers will be of less relevance in the near future than ‘users’ and the minutes of content they
are consuming, whether live or clips or highlights, on TV, mobiles or other devices. “We are working towards having moreusers. I’m convinced in 10 years nobody will be taking about audience figures – instead we’ll be taking about users.”
On the pitch, the early season talk was of the stuttering of Barcelona and Real Madrid, and the initial charge of little
Granada. And then of Lionel Messi, as his goals started to flow and he picked up yet another Ballon D’Or.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, then Barcelona and Real Madrid will by vying for the title as Atletico Madrid, Valencia and Sevilla areamong those chasing Champions League slots for next season. At the other end of the table, the money, or lack of it,
would point to a season of struggle for Osasuna, Valladolid, Alaves and Eibar especially.
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LA LIGA ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMSPANISH TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALReal Madrid

33,203,419

80,135,349

110,549,665

223,888,433

Barcelona

31,189,869

79,304,321

103,119,974

213,614,164

Atlético Madrid

4,511,617

8,505,569

13,742,697

26,759,883

Valencia

1,228,600

726,335

3,364,554

5,319,489

Sevilla954,425

795,809

1,814,110

3,564,344

Real Betis

742,633

870,507

1,236,598

2,849,738

Athletic Bilbao

853,206

312,009

1,042,767

2,207,982

Real Sociedad

606,366

177,936

1,181,397

1,965,699

Villarreal

468,660

538,123

913,574

1,920,357

Celta Vigo

441,597

194,006

526,945

1,162,548

Espanyol

440,908

203,131448,602

1,092,641

Granada366,181

96,769362,257

825,207

Levante407,433

144,525

246,300

798,258

Valladolid

337,251

158,260

236,100

731,611

Mallorca

300,193

79,744

237,196

617,133

Osasuna

232,615

72,111

254,117558,843

Leganes

250,913

135,915

93,697

480,525Eibar

217,668

112,407

103,765

433,840

Alavés207,633

71,852

134,972

414,457

Getafe97,229101,409

133,199

331,837

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The three most successful all-time La Liga teams are Real Madrid (33 championship wins), Barcelona (26) and
Atletico Madrid (10), the only other team in double figures. They are first, second and third in La Liga global
popularity.
ii: It requires just two teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total popularity.
In fact Real and Barca share 90 per cent and Atletico five per cent more. The other 17 clubs combined have about as
many followers as Atletico. This is not a league with competitive depth.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Barcelona) and the lowest payers (Osasuna) is 27.13 to 1, ahuge figure that illustrates zero genuine competitive balance from top to bottom.
iv: The top 10% of La Liga earners make 54.5% of all basic pay. Those players are concentrated at Barcelona, Real
Madrid and Atletico. The only league with a more skewed pay allocation is China’s CSL.

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SERIE A ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, SERIE A, 2019-20 SEASONITALIAN TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

20192020

20TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:£976,666,680$1,220,833,350
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£1,785,497 (UP BY 17.5% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$2,231,871

PLAYERS

547

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No8 LEAGUEMEDIAN SALARY:£1,041,667$1,302,084

THE STATE OF PLAY

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1Juventus£8,085,317$10,106,646

2

Roma

£3,594,322$4,492,903

3Internazionale£3,260,031$4,075,039

4

Napoli£3,058,862$3,823,578

5

Milan

£2,752,976$3,441,220

6

Lazio

£1,931,662$2,414,578

7

Torino£1,458,333$1,822,916

8

Bologna£1,258,929$1,573,661

9

Fiorentina£1,204,427$1,505,534

10Cagliari£1,150,452$1,438,065

11

Atalanta£1,025,492$1,281,865

12

Genoa

£999,504$1,249,380

13Sampdoria£959,325$1,199,156

14

Sassuolo£915,751$1,144,689

15

Lecce

£852,055$1,065,069

16

Parma

£832,738$1,040,923

17

SPAL

£791,667$989,584

18

Udinese£675,843$844,804

19

Hellas Verona£514,593$643,241

20

Brescia£464,744$580,930

Juventus landed a record-extending eighth consecutive Serie A title in 2018-19 to take their all-time tally of titles to 35 andstretch their lead as Italy’s most frequent champions over Milan and Inter (both on 18). Whether they will make it to ninestraight remains to be seen but after 15 games played by mid-December they were two points off the top with 36 points,
behind Internazionale (38). At that stage Lazio were in third (33 points) with Cagliari in fourth (29), Roma fifth (29), andAtalanta sixth (28). Four of those six clubs (not Cagliari and Atalanta) are also the six best-paid in Serie A by average basic
salary by this GSSS’s calculations.
If you are interested in significant financial developments in this season’s Serie’s A and haven’t yet read the introductory essay of this report, it might be of interest. A tax break for workers from various employment sectors - including footballers is coming into force in Italy in 2020. Its precise effect remains to be seen (see introductory essay) but in a nutshell, clubs arehighly likely to benefit because they won’t have to pay so much tax on behalf of certain new players. Year-on-year wage
inflation has been driven strongly by this factor at particular clubs, including Juventus. “The working” for this is detailed in
the essay. Juventus’s wage bill is now more than double the next best paid team, presumably with an eye on Champions
League glory as much as another Serie A title.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, Juventus will make it nine in a row with Roma, Inter, Napoli, Milan and Lazio competing forChampions League berths. At the other end, the relegation contenders would be among the eight teams with averagebasic pay lower than £1m per player: Brescia, Hellas Verona, Udinese, SPAL, Parma, Lecce, Sassuolo, Sampdoria andGenoa. After 15 games in 2019-20, seven of those nine were the bottom seven in the table.

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SERIE A ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMITALIAN TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALJuventus

7,491,840

33,544,560

39,921,717

80,958,117

Milan

7,136,255

6,555,587

24,636,842

38,328,684

Internazionale

1,956,126

3,919,982

17,998,713

23,874,821

Roma

1,837,186

2,985,461

9,485,192

14,307,839

Napoli

1,549,670

1,878,810

4,435,884

7,864,364

Fiorentina

659,691

610,2082,083,480

3,353,379

Lazio

525,101

477,731

838,547

1,841,379

Bologna

162,231

125,316

1,030,122

1,317,669

Torino405,127

239,031

476,191

1,120,349

Cagliari

355,137

227,710364,440

947,287

Sampdoria

346,939

163,968

346,903857,810Genoa

322,550

167,144346,874

836,568

Atalanta

306,874

213,528

269,736

790,138

Sassuolo

267,697

209,832

258,484

736,013Hellas Verona

258,958

84,462

274,334

617,754

Parma

29,245

257,615

295,238

582,098

Udinese290,026

114,512

115,421519,959

Brescia

29,173

103,41085,496

218,079

SPAL

20,797

92,07961,793

174,669

Lecce

2,308

79,90365,528

147,739

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The three most successful all-time Serie A teams (Juventus, Milan, Inter) are the top three in current global
popularity in that order, with Roma (seventh most successful but who have a brilliant social media team) in fourth.
ii: It requires as few as two teams combined - Juve and Inter - in social media numbers to amass more than half theleague’s total popularity. With only two other teams having more than four per cent of the league’s share, this is not acompetition with multiple serious challengers.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Juventus) and the lowest payers (Brescia) is 17.4 to 1, a hugefigure and indicative of a polarised league where small teams have no chance.
iv: The top 10% of earners make 40.4% of all basic pay. Only two other football leagues in this GSSS are less ‘top
heavy’ in this regard (EPL, Bundesliga), while the other six are more so.

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BUNDESLIGA ANALYSISGERMAN TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

20192020

18
TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:£780,769,070$975,961,338
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£1,583,710 (UP BY 13.4% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$1,979,638

PLAYERS

493

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No9 LEAGUEMEDIAN SALARY:£897,182$1,121,478

AVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, BUNDESLIGA, 2019-20 SEASON
RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1

Bayern Munich£6,495,917$8,119,896

2

Borussia Dortmund£3,977,086$4,971,358

3

Bayer Leverkusen£2,549,201$3,186,501

4

RB Leipzig£1,933,091$2,416,364

5Wolfsburg£1,928,316$2,410,395

6

Schalke£1,748,145$2,185,181

7

Borussia Monchengladbach£1,535,462$1,919,327

8

Hoffenheim£1,359,973$1,699,966

9Werder Bremen£1,252,983$1,566,229

10

Eintracht Frankfurt£1,230,655$1,538,319

11Hertha Berlin£1,036,288$1,295,360

12

FC Koln£979,537$1,224,422

13

Augsburg£813,708$1,017,136

14

Mainz

£681,484$851,855

15

Fortuna Dusseldorf£604,020$755,025

16

Freiburg£582,394$727,992

17

Union Berlin£541,123$676,404

18

Paderborn£334,998$418,748

THE STATE OF PLAY

Bayern, Bayern, Bayern, Bayern, Bayern, Bayern, Bayern. Seven league titles in a row. Eight in the last 10 years. Fourteenin the last 20. Twenty-eight titles from 56 completed Bundesliga seasons in the league’s current format. Half the honours
annexed by one team. Bayern Munich have been the biggest, richest and strongest club by far in Germany for more thanhalf a century, with double the resources (at least) of their nearest challengers. And yet there could be something like a title
race afoot in Germany’s top division, at the time of writing, after most teams had played 15 games.
At that stage, RB Leipzig were top on 33 points, then Monchengladbach (31 points), Dortmund (29), Bayern (27), andSchalke, Freiburg and Bayer Leverkusen (all 25).
A year ago, around this time (November / December) it also looked as if a genuine title race might be unfolding although
in the end, Bayern beat Dortmund by two points, beat third-place Leipzig by 12 points and beat fourth-placed Bayer Leverkusen by 20 points.
Bayern’s summer transfer dealings under manager Niko Kovač included the loan signings of big-money players including
Philippe Coutinho from Barcelona and Ivan Perišić from Internazionale, as well as the permanent signing, among others,of Lucas Hernandez from Atletico Madrid for €80m (£71m). Significant departures in the same window were Franck Ribery(to Fiorentina, free), Arjen Robben (retired), James Rodriguez (returning to parent club Real Madrid after a loan) and Mats
Hummels (sold to Dortmund).
Kovač was sacked in early November and at the time of writing Bayern continue to ponder a permanent replacement withevery major name in the game reportedly under consideration.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, Bayern Munich will rally to win the title ahead of Dortmund, Leverkusen, Leipzig, Wolfsburg and
Schalke while Freiburg, Union Berlin and Paderborn will go down. Poor (general) management as always will contributeto scuppering expectations at some rich clubs while excellent management will help some of the poorer clubs to punch
above their weight.
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BUNDESLIGA ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMGERMAN TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALBayern Munich

4,741,432

18,873,641

49,689,094

73,304,167

Borussia Dortmund

3,412,884

8,583,754

15,119,982

27,116,620

Schalke 04

733,717760,427

2,884,606

4,378,750

Bayer Leverkusen

415,492

658,7732,684,819

3,759,084

Borussia Monchengladbach

493,745

412,116

1,064,907

1,970,768

Wolfsburg

283,203

380,605

1,219,112

1,882,920

Werder Bremen

503,984

294,244

1,014,022

1,812,250

FC Koln

645,231285,954764,757

1,695,942

RB Leipzig

171,643

313,775

397,925

883,343

Hertha Berlin

345,526

143,478

362,598

851,602Mainz

187,287

100,420

433,709721,416

Hoffenheim

202,214

213,175

297,837

713,226

Eintracht Frankfurt

486,446

60,50095,886642,832

Freiburg

271,320

97,038244,858

613,216

Augsburg

197,523

106,783

249,899554,205

Fortuna Düsseldorf

163,033

92,282

217,302472,617

Union Berlin

143,488

79,514

145,874

368,876

Paderborn

65,43530,26699,916

195,617

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The three most successful all-time Bundesliga teams are the top three in current global popularity: Bayern Munich,Dortmund and Schalke. Bayer Leverkusen in fourth place in popularity terms are punching about their weight (as the
11th most successful club) while Moenchenglabach (in fourth place among current BL teams in terms of success) are
fifth in global popularity.
ii: It requires as few as one team in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total popularity(Bayern, 60 per cent). This points to domination by one Goliath to the extent the league has a credibility problem, ingenuinely competitive terms.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers (Bayern Munich) and the lowest payers (Paderborn) is 19.39 to 1, a hugefigure illustrating the gulf in resources and why Bayern have been so dominant.
iv: The top 10% of Bundesliga earners this season make 38.9% of all basic pay. Only five other leagues in this GSSS
are less ‘top heavy’ in this regard, and only one football league, the EPL.

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LIGUE 1 ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, LIGUE 1, 2019-20 SEASONFRENCH TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

20192020

20TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:£551,581,121$1,038,759
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£689,476,401 (UP BY 4.9% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$1,298,449

PLAYERS

531

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No10 LEAGUEMEDIAN SALARY:£455,118$568,898

THE STATE OF PLAY

We calculate PSG’s payroll this season will amount to around 34 per cent all salaries paid by Ligue 1’s 20 clubs combined,
followed by Monaco (around 11 per cent), Lyon and Marseille (around 8 per cent each) then Lille (approaching five percent) while the smallest wage bills at clubs from Nikes to Brest, Reims and Amiens won’t reach even two per cent each.

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1

PSG£7,147,376$8,934,220

2

Monaco£2,269,960$2,837,450

3

Lyon

£1,865,322$2,331,653

4

Marseille£1,609,766$2,012,208

5

Lille

£1,062,131$1,327,664

6Saint-Etienne£806,746$1,008,433

7Rennes£780,481$975,601

8

Bordeaux£657,031$821,289

9

Nice£593,511$741,889

10Montpellier£544,706$680,883

11

Nantes£543,609$679,511

12

Toulouse£487,059$608,824

13

Angers£392,968$491,210

14

Strasbourg£372,095$465,119

15

Dijon

£327,186$408,983

16

Amiens£325,263$406,579

17

Metz£320,590$400,738

18

Reims

£320,097$400,121

19

Brest

£283,354$354,193

20

Nimes

£238,817$298,521

Two years ago, in the GSSS published in November 2017, we calculated that the top Ligue 1 payers, in order, would be
PSG (with 26 per cent of all salaries), then Monaco (10 per cent), Marseille (10 per cent), Lyon (nine per cent), Nice andBordeaux (both around five per cent) and Lille (just over four per cent). When official data for the 2017-18 season was
published more than a year later, by the DNCG, that was precisely how the numbers had panned out. The DNCG is the
Direction Nationale du Contrôle de Gestion, the organisation responsible for monitoring and overseeing the accounts
of professional association football clubs in France. So we have a high degree of confidence that PSG are, if anything,increasing their stranglehold.
Ligue 1 hasn’t been a meaningful competition for a number of years even though Monaco managed to win a recent title,
in 2017, before falling apart. PSG then obliterated the transfer world record by paying €222m for Neymar from Barcelona
and romped to the next two Ligue 1 titles.
When you’re spending massive sums on players and wages and are able to strip your closest domestic rivals - thenMonaco - of their best players (exhibit A being Kylian Mbappé, who moved permanently to PSG in summer 2018 for€145m and add-ons), you’re likely going to keep crushing the pack. And this season PSG have again extended their lead,
pay-wise, over the next richest club. In 2018-19, their basic average pay was just under three times as much as the next
biggest payers, Marseille, while this year is it more than three times as much as the next biggest payers, Monaco.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, then PSG will win the title, with Monaco, Lyon and Marseille leading the race for second; and nine clubs
with average salaries below £500,000 per year will be scrapping in a relegation fight: Toulouse, Angers, Strasbourg, Dijon,
Amiens, Metz, Reims, Brest and Nimes.
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LIGUE 1 ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMFRENCH TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOK

TOTAL

PSG

7,395,583

25,545,235

38,090,176

71,030,994

Marseille

3,227,006

1,300,798

5,275,497

9,803,301

Monaco2,145,600

1,506,518

5,867,286

9,519,404

Lyon

1,718,983

1,281,415

3,575,477

6,575,875

Lille

725,168

276,869

994,093

1,996,130Saint-Etienne

804,014238,747

850,338

1,893,099

Bordeaux

386,636

131,333

1,017,174

1,535,143

Nantes557,834

341,682

490,765

1,390,281

Nice455,369

303,131502,024

1,260,524

Rennes331,705

150,384

486,564

968,653

Toulouse

471,797

103,019

367,989

942,805

Montpellier

360,342

145,799

319,523825,664

Reims

213,198

39,927

216,859

469,984Metz

154,455

66,982

210,169

431,606

Strasbourg

136,494

91,860140,726

369,080

Angers116,705

57,146

188,891

362,742Dijon

108,160

61,063

159,159

328,382

Brest

67,99836,810128,785

233,593

Nimes

78,35236,60577,470

192,427

Amiens58,13642,76089,191

190,087

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The four most popular Ligue 1 teams are among the top six all-time most successful Ligue 1 teams: PSG, Marseille,
Monaco and Lyon. The other two from the most successful six clubs, Saint-Etienne and Nantes, haven’t won titles for
38 years and 18 years respectively, well before the social media age.
ii: It requires solely PSG to amass more than half the league’s total popularity. If PSG paying 34 per cent of all wages
is a message of inequality then 64 per cent of global followers bellows something is amiss.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (PSG) and the lowest payers (Nimes) is 29.93 to 1, the highest
ratio of any GSSS league. This isn’t a competition, it’s a parade. Again.
iv: The top 10% of Ligue earners make 53.4% of all basic pay. Only La LIga and China’s CSL are more ‘top heavy’ inthis regard, and therefore less balanced or ’less fair’.

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CSL ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, CSL, 2019 SEASONCHINESE SUPER LEAGUE FOOTBALL

2019

16
TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:£469,370,665$586,713,331
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£965,783 (UP BY 20.8% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$1,207,229

PLAYERS

486

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No11 LEAGUEMEDIAN SALARY:£293,091$366,364

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1

Shanghai SIPG

£1,832,419$2,290,524

2Guangzhou Evergrande£1,823,054$2,278,818

3

Hebei China Fortune£1,610,425$2,013,031

4Dalian Yifang£1,320,105$1,650,131

5

Shanghai Shenhua£1,197,164$1,496,455

6Jiangsu Suning£1,194,117$1,492,647

7

Shandong Luneng£1,156,687$1,445,859

8

Guangzhou R&F£910,051$1,137,564

9Beijing Guoan£789,867$987,333

10

Tianjin Teda

£731,633$914,541

11

Wuhan Zall

£590,038$737,548

12

Chongqing Lifan£533,646$667,058

13

Henan Jianye£523,754$654,693

14

Shenzhen F.C.

£418,528$523,160

15

Tianjin Tianhai£396,004$495,005

16

Beijing Renhe£394,013$492,516

THE STATE OF PLAY

The CSL continues to operate as a financial madhouse with the country’s most successful club of recent times, Guangzhou
Evergrande, hemorrhaging money at an accelerating rate, while big losses are common elsewhere too. In the financial
year of 2017, Guangzhou made a loss on $156m. And when the annual report for 2018 was published in May this year,that had rocketed up to $267m - for a company with income of just $90m but operating costs of $361m. New financial
regulations put in place by the Chinese FA and supposedly coming into effect for 2019 state that operating costs for CSL
clubs should be capped at $174m and losses must be capped at no more than $46m. Whether this happens remains tobe seen, but Guangzhou’s average basic first-team pay has actually grown year-on-year from £1.66m to just over £1.82m.
Average salaries across the league have grown a whopping 20 per cent, and we are only measuring player pay, not themassive money being spent on foreign managers. Rafa Benitez has been earning a reported £12m basic per year at Dalian
Yifang, a similar sum to Fabio Cannavaro at Guangzhou, while Vitor Pereira reportedly earns even more at Shanghai SIPG.
There remains no evidence that current revenues from tickets, TV or commercial deals can pay the massive wage bills of
the CSL’s biggest spenders. And quantifying the exact state of the league’s finances is impossible when there is close to notransparency from most clubs.
The problem with a salary cap is it won’t be fully supported by all the clubs. Some of them can afford to have a popular
asset losing large sums, at least in the medium term, because against their owners’ wider riches, the losses are small. Caps
may also start to impinge on ability to attract good foreign talent at a time when the CSL wants to keep hiring top players.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money alone had talked, then the 2019 CSL title race would have been between Shanghai SIPG and Guangzhou
Evergrande with Hebei China Fortune and Dalian Yifang in the shake-up, and Shenzhen F.C, Tianjin Tianhai and Beijing
Renhe in trouble at the bottom. As it transpired, Shanghai SIPG won from Beijing Guoan second and Guangzhou
Evergrande third. Shenzhen F.C, and Beijing Renhe were relegated.
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CSL ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMCHINESE SUPER LEAGUE FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALGuangzhou Evergrande

17,94555,46435,732

109,141

Beijing Guoan

11,152

18,7152,407

32,274

Shangd ong Lunengn/a

24,884

5,261

30,145

Shanghai SIPG

1,629

15,375

11,082

28,086

Jiangsu Suning

2,942

20,8892,100

25,931

Shanghai Shenua

44

19,827

3,527

23,398Dalian Yifang

1,074

13,023928

15,025

Guangzhou R&F

1,423

2,471

339

4,233

Tianjin Teda

448

2,759

238

3,445

Hebei China Fortune

81

1,793

844

2,718

Wuhan Zall

n/a

2,262

215

2,477

Chongqing Lifan

n/a

1,743

515

2,258

Henan Jianye

136

1,917

62

2,115

Tianjin Tianhai

n/a

n/a

1,772

1,772

Shenzhen FC

325

348

467

1,140

Beijing Renhe

n/a

378

n/a

378

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: Guangzhou Evergrande have won seven of the past nine CSL titles and are clearly the most popular on the three‘western’ social media platforms measured here. So they give international followers, not domestic. These numbers
clearly don’t reflect the massive Chinese platforms such as WeChat, Sina Weibo and Tencent.
ii: It requires as few as three CSL teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. The recent dominant Guangzhou and a club from the capital dominate.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Shanghai SIPG) and the lowest payers (Beijing Renhe) is 4.65
to 1, a smaller figure than any other football league in this GSSS, bar MLS
iv: The top 10% of CSL earners make an eye-watering 69.9% of all basic pay. No other league in this study is
anywhere close to being this ‘top heavy’, with the 49 best-paid players splitting just over £328m between them.

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NPB ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, NPB, 2019 SEASONNIPPON PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL

2019

12
TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:£252,048,904$315,061,130
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£700,136 (UP BY 4.1% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$875,170

PLAYERS360

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No12 LEAGUE

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1

Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks£1,214,599$1,518,248

2

Yomiuri Giants£1,173,710$1,467,138

3

Hanshin Tigers£780,389$975,487

4

Yakult Swallows£699,757$874,696

5

Hiroshima Toyo Carp

£651,034$813,793

6

Tohoku Raketten GE£650,243$812,804

7

Yokohama DeNA BayStars£636,910$796,137

8

Saitama Seibu Lions£613,260$766,575

9

Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters£529,562$661,953

10

China Lotte Marines£528,078$660,097

11

Chunichi Dragons£497,567$621,959

12

Orix Buffaloes£426,521$533,151

MEDIAN SALARY:£437,956$547,445

THE STATE OF PLAY

It was deja vu in Japan’s elite baseball league in 2019. The Japan Series was won, again, by the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks,
for a fifth time in six years. They beat the Yomiuri Giants for the title. The Hawks were the best paid team in the NPB,again, with average salaries almost £41,000 per man bigger than their closest financial rivals - the Giants. Average pay
across the league rose by just over four per cent, a similar rise to the previous year.
After 143 games of the regular season, the Hawks were only second in the Pacific League behind the Saitama Seibu Lions,exactly as they had been in 2018. Their opponents in the Japan Series, the Giants, finished top of the Central League, as
their opponents in the 2018 Japan Series had (Hiroshima).
The Hawks employed three of the top 10 earners in the NPB in 2019, down from seven in 2018, but again including
Cuban all-star Alfredo Despaigne, nicknamed ‘El Caballo de los Caballos’ or ‘The Stallion of the Stallions’. He was onaround £2.9m while team-mate Yuki Yanagita was on £4.2m. The other Hawks player in the top 10 was an American
pitcher, Dennis Surface, on £3.65m.
The Hawks have been owned since 2005 by the SoftBank Corporation, part of the SoftBank multi-national holding
conglomerate that owns stakes in giants including Yahoo Japan and Uber among many more.
SoftBank were part of a consortium of investors who last year (2018) were reported to be offering almost £20billion to create
new and expanded international football tournaments with the world governing body, FIFA. The consortium also includes
money from Saudi Arabia, the USA and China. One of the proposed events would be a revamped club World Cup.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talked then we would have expected the Hawks to beat the Giants in the Japan Series, and that is what
happened. The Hanshin Tigers, third best paid, finished effectively in third. The two lowest paid teams, the Dragons andBuffaloes, had two of the four worst records in the regular season.
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NPB ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMNIPPON PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALHanshin Tigers

1,404,464

238,769

346,760

1,989,993

Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters

937,412214,553

289,691

1,441,656

Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks

946,690

204,565

150,343

1,301,598

Yomiuri Giants

442,598

291,800

303,511

1,037,909

Chunichi Dragons

828,395

23,302

139,733

991,430

Chiba Lotte Marines

764,543

112,359

85,341

962,243

Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles

664,221103,101

177,507944,829

Tokyo Yakult Swallows

620,650n/a

77,633

698,283

Saitama Seibu Lions

416,984n/a

76,241

493,225

Orix Buffaloes

332,571

83,97957,410473,960

Yokohama DeNA Bay Stars

152,800

112,480

159,037

424,317

Hiroshima Toyo Carpn/a97,796n/a

97,796

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The most successful all-time NPB teams are the Giants (22 Japan Series wins), the Saitama Seibu Lions (13) and theHawks (10, the only other team in double figures), but the Hawks and Giants only ranked third and fourth in social
media popularity.
ii: It requires as many as five NPB teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. This points to a spread of contenders over time.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Hawks) and the lowest payers (Buffaloes) is 2.85 to 1, a figuremuch lower than the only other baseball league in this GSSS.
iv: The top 10% of NPB earners make 39.1% of all basic pay. Six other leagues in this GSSS are less ‘top heavy’ in thisregard, while 11 concentrate their pay even more intensely among the best paid.

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MLS ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, MLS, 2019 SEASONRANKMAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER

2019

24
TEAMS

PLAYERS702

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£230,665,742$288,332,177£328,584 (UP BY 15.2% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$410,730

No13 LEAGUE£143,998$179,998

TEAM

			
1
Toronto FC
2
LA Galaxy3
Chicago Fire
4
LAFC
5
Seattle Sounders FC
6
Portland Timbers
7
Montreal Impact
8
Orlando City SC
9Sporting Kansas City
10
New England Revolution
11
Atlanta United
12
Minnesota United
13
DC United
14
New York City FC
15
Columbus Crew
16
Real Salt Lake
17
San Jose Earthquakes
18
Philadelphia Union
19
Colorado Rapids
20
Houston Dynamo
21
New York Red Bulls
22
FC Cincinnati
23
FC Dallas
24
Vancouver Whitecaps

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, ££606,677£523,303£488,999£407,999£390,812£371,968£350,727£335,086£332,984£327,945£323,928£303,785£302,082£297,588£292,817£286,911£273,935£271,110£245,714£241,237£239,143£231,877£226,340£217,390

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		
$758,346$654,129$611,249$509,998$488,515$464,960$438,409$418,858$416,230$409,932$404,910$379,732$377,603$371,985$366,021$358,638$342,419$338,887$307,143$301,547$298,929$289,846$282,925$271,738

THE STATE OF PLAY

The 2019 MLS season was the 24th season of Major League Soccer, a season in which the league expanded to 24
franchises with FC Cincinnati’s arrival. They had a disappointing debut campaign, finishing bottom in the Eastern
Conference with just six wins and with 10 points few than the next worst team, Vancouver.
The 24 teams are split into two conferences, with the regular season comprising 34 games for each, 17 at home and 17
away. The season ended on 10 November with the MLS Cup, contested after a new format of single-match rounds.
Two players with mighty international reputations played another MLS season, Zlatan Ibrahimović at LA Galaxy and Wayne
Rooney for DC United. Neither could be sufficiently influential to take their teams deep into the post-season.
Cincinnati, despite their poor on-field performances, had the third highest average attendances (at 27,336 per game),
bettered only by Atlanta United (52,510 average) and Seattle Sounders (40,247).
The Sounders won the MLS Cup having finished the regular season fourth in the overall table (on 58 points), where Atlanta
were third (58 points), New York City second (64) and Los Angeles FC clear at the top on 72 points.
Attacking players are valued in MLS, literally, and thus highly paid. Defenders - not so much. Of the 40 best paid players in
2019, just one was a defender: Vancouver wing-back Ali Adnan in 37th place. The top 36 were comprised of forwards andmidfielders with the exception a solitary goalkeeper, Tim Howard, in 13th place.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money alone had talked then good things should have been expected from the top five payers: Toronto FC, LA
Galaxy, Chicago Fire, LAFC and the Seattle Sounders. LAFC won the Supporters Shield for topping the table while Seattle
won the MLS Cup against Toronto. The worst two teams after the regular season (Cincinnati and Vancouver) were two of
the three lowest paid teams.
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MLS ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAM

MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALLA Galaxy

512,122

1,227,683

2,287,869

4,027,674

New York City FC

391,294

628,159

2,246,678

3,266,131

Atlanta United

996,328

429,113289,437

1,714,878

Seattle Sounders

563,586

298,980

742,994

1,605,560

Orlando City

486,920305,715615,115

1,407,750

New York Red Bulls

214,317

166,158

990,656

1,371,131

LAFC

246,047

385,174

438,073

1,069,294

Toronto FC

412,150

211,898352,218

976,266

Sporting Kansas City

391,466

146,907335,839874,212

Houston Dynamo

424,648

127,963

320,905

873,516

Portland Timbers

352,487

141,339

310,743804,569

Montreal Impact

337,933

105,676

337,759

781,368

Vancouver Whitecaps

334,776

128,707263,961

727,444

FC Dallas

166,904

93,365376,580

636,849

Chicago Fire

168,531111,730

335,414615,675

DC United

160,987

141,345

283,073585,405

San Jose Earthquakes

268,507

81,375

190,935

540,817

Columbus Crew

176,275

94,902

213,196484,373

Philadelphia Union

141,009

87,053

192,858

420,920

Real Salt Lake

158,145

258,718

page down

416,863

New England Revolution

113,193

81,106

211,549

405,848

Minnesota United

140,91474,957

178,601

394,472

Colorado Rapids

110,91356,653

218,767

386,333

FC Cincinnati

103,934

93,266

94,287

291,487

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The most successful all-time MLS team (LA Galaxy) team is also the top MLS team in current global popularity. Fourof the other five most popular teams joined MLS only relatively recently: New York City FC (2015), Atlanta United(2017), Seattle Sounders (2009) and Orlando City (2015)
ii: It requires as many as six teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
popularity. This points to a spread of contenders.

Data: mid-November 2019iii: The ratio between the highest payers (Toronto) and the lowest payers (Vancouver) is 2.79 to 1, a lower figure thanany other football league in this GSSS, an indication of competitive balance.
iv: The top 10% of MLS earners this season make 46.6% of all basic pay. Three other GSSS football leagues are ‘fairer’(EPL, Bundesliga Serie A), while five are more “top heavy” in this regard.

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J-LEAGUE ANALYSISJAPANESE TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

2019

18
TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:£137,010,947$171,263,684
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£261,471 (UP BY 9.2% YEAR-ON-YEAR)$326,839

PLAYERS

524

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No14 LEAGUEMEDIAN SALARY:£109,489$136,861

AVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, J-LEAGUE, 2019 SEASON
RANK

TEAM

AVG ANNUAL

AVG ANNUAL			

PER PLAYER, £PER PLAYER, $		

1£1,257,790

Vissel Kobe

$1,572,238

2Urawa Red Diamonds£357,947$447,433

3

Sagan Tosu

£344,838$431,048

4

Kawasaki Frontale£330,852$413,564

5

Nagoya Grampus£300,753$375,942

6

Kashima Antlers£248,710$310,888

7

Cerezo Osaka£205,994$257,493

8

FC Tokyo£203,249$254,062

9

Shimizu S-Pulse£194,512$243,140

10

Jubilo Iwata£171,582$214,477

11

Gamba Osaka£169,526$211,907

12

Yokohama F Marinos£161,665$202,08213

Consadole Sapporo£161,226$201,533

14

Sanfrecce Hiroshima£155,157$193,946

15

Vegalta Sendai£141,774$177,218

16

Matsumoto Yamaga£120,209$150,261

17

Shonan Bellmare£105,931$132,413

18

Oita Trinita£56,465$70,581

THE STATE OF PLAY

Starting from the 2019 season, there were no longer any restrictions on the number of foreign players that a single team could
sign, although there remains a limit of five foreign players per match-day squad. Players from J-League “partner nations” Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore, Indonesia and Qatar - are exempt from these restrictions.
Vissel Kobe have embraced the change to continue signing big-name, big-contract imported players, with Thomas
Vermaelen arriving in the second half of the year to join former Barcelona teammates Andrés Iniesta, David Villa andSergi Samper, and former Arsenal team-mate Lukas Podolski. When Kobe’s two Brazilians are added (Wellington and
Dankler), and Korea’s Kim Seung-gyu, the club’s eight highest paid players in 2019 were those eight imports. Theirsalaries pushed Vissel’s average basic pay to almost £1.3m per man for the first-team squad as a whole, approachingfour times as much as the next best paid team, Urawa Red Diamonds.
The star strategy is ultimately driven by Kobe-born billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani, worth nearly $6bn and the founder of
e-commerce and internet firm Rakuten, as well as Vissel Kobe’s chairman. Rakuten own and sponsor the club, and arealso the shirt sponsors of Barcelona, hence the pre-existing connection to the former Barca players. For all the glitz ofthe squad, Kobe could finish no higher than eighth in 2019.
The overwhelming foreign nationality of choice for most J-League clubs remains Brazilian players. Only one of the 18
clubs did not have at least one Brazilian in 2019 while each of the other 17 clubs had an average of more than three each.
Yokohama F.Marinos, 20 per cent owned by Manchester City’s partner company, the City Football Group, had five Brazilians.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talked, then Vissel Kobe would be champions of 2019 with Urawa Red Diamonds in second. Yokohama
F.Marinos won the title. Matsumoto Yamaga, Shonan Bellmare and Oita Trinita would have been relegated. The firsttwo were.
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J-LEAGUE ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAM

JAPANESE TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALCerezo Osaka

165,622

48,414

1,008,628

1,222,664

Kashima Antlers

415,101

125,597

63,580604,278

Yokohama F Marinos

459,385

57,98868,410585,783

Urawa Red Diamonds

415,272

88,78370,192574,247

Kawasaki Frontale

369,688

68,069113,721551,478

Nagoya Grampus

413,359

45,34256,361

515,062

Vissel Kobe

111,626

177,123

58,150346,899

Gamba Osaka

177,285

59,598101,189

338,072

Sanfrecce Hiroshima

214,155

37,407

82,187

333,749

FC Tokyo

217,22144,66257,658319,541

Consadole Sapporo

92,612

48,24970,357211,218

Shonan Bellmare

141,947

16,77019,077

177,794

Jubilo Iwata

114,524

20,677

31,955

167,156

Shimizu S-Pulse

114,590

21,46930,546

166,605

Sagan Tosu

82,70745,14027,466

155,313

Matsumoto Yamaga

81,78916,36824,592

122,749

Oita Trinita

29,871

18,501

29,04877,420

Vegalta Sendai

24,245

19,46014,00857,713

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
Data: mid-November 2019

i: The four most popular J-League teams in social media popularity are all among the six most successful J-League
teams.
ii: It requires five teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total popularity, but
10 of 18 teams each have between nine and 19 per cent. This points to a spread of contenders.
iii: The ratio between the highest payers (Vissel Kobe) and the lowest payers (Oita Trinita) is 22.28 to 1, a huge figurethat highlights how one club are gambling big money on ageing superstars.
iv: The top 10% of earners this season make 52.1% of all basic pay. Only four other leagues in this GSSS are more
‘top heavy’ in this regard, all football leagues, in Scotland, France, Spain and China.

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AVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, SCOTTISH PREMIERSHIP,
2019-20 SEASONSCOT PREM ANALYSISSCOTTISH TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

20192020

12TEAMS

PLAYERS306

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£62,095,607$77,619,509£202,927$253,659

No15 LEAGUE

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £1£895,564

CelticAVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		
$1,119,455

2

Rangers£649,771$812,213

3

Aberdeen£140,461$175,576

4Hearts£137,942$172,4285

Hibernian£119,700$149,625

6

Kilmarnock£68,412$85,514

7

St Johnstone£62,691$78,364

8

Motherwell£59,304$74,130

9Ross County£55,574$69,46710

St Mirren£48,621$60,776

11

Livingston£43,105$53,88112

Hamilton£41,154$51,443£191,192$238,990

THE STATE OF PLAY

Rangers are closing the gap on Celtic. That’s what the off-pitch salary numbers are telling us about the on-pitch situationin the race for the Scottish title. In last year’s GSSS, published in November, we calculated the average basic first-team pay
at Ibrox to be £466,556, against a figure of £865,614 at Celtic. That meant Rangers were spending around 54 per cent of
the Celtic figure. But that was on a squad after the 2018 summer transfer window. By the time the season was over, withins and outs in the January transfer window, not least Jermain Defe and Steven Davis arriving at Ibrox, we reckoned thedifferential was something closer to 60 per cent, and perhaps a bit more.
Now we have the official financial statements for both clubs for the 2018-19 season, it seems that was pretty much right.
Rangers’ club wage bill of £34.5m was 61.5 per cent of Celtic’s wage bill of £59m.
So to this season, where we calculate Rangers wages have climbed a significant 39 per cent from September last season
to September this season, up to £649,771 average first-team basic. Celtic’s have grown but not by much to £895,564 average first-team basic. We reckon the ratio of Rangers’ salaries to Celtic’s is now above 70 per cent, and depending what
happens in the winter window, might yet be higher. Rangers are closing the gap on Celtic.
Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs are a long way behind the big two in pay, each having average basic pay between £140,000
and £120,000 per year. The full range of salaries in the Scottish top division is just remarkable. Celtic pay more per man,basic, than Sheffield United of the English Premier League, while the seven lowest Scottish Premiership spenders pay lessthan quite a few teams in the fifth tier of English football.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, then it’s Celtic, Rangers and Aberdeen in the top three with Hamilton, Livingston and St Mirren going
down. Good or bad management can out- or under-perform those expectations.
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SCOT PREM ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMSCOTTISH TOP-DIVISION FOOTBALL

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTAL

Celtic652,723435,778

2,022,901

3,111,402

Rangers

509,880

328,306

663,6131,501,799

Aberdeen

101,400

46,744

106,606

254,750

Hibernian82,20236,36075,380193,942Hearts86,81633,011

44,867

164,694

Motherwell43,246

19,416

46,165

108,827

St Johnstone

36,075

9,083

27,85073,008

Kilmarnock

37,734

13,184

18,79869,716

St Mirren

32,155

8,419

20,64561,219Ross County

15,378

6,557

18,12340,058Hamilton

26,187

5,751

2,551

34,489

Livingston

20,263

4,629

9,210

34,102

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The five most successful all-time Scottish top-division teams are also the top five in current global popularity. Celtic
and Rangers are way ahead in titles and popularity, by many miles, followed by Aberdeen, Hearts and Hibs.

TOTAL FIRST-TEAM

ii: It requires just one team (Celtic) in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total popularity and
SALARIES, CURRENT
two (adding Rangers) to reach 83 per cent. This points to the duopoly that the Od Firm have had on Scottish sincePREM
any other team last won the title (Aberdeen,SCOT
1985); andCeltic SEASON
being ahead in social media popularity because of therecency bias of the last eight consecutive titles falling in the social media age.

£54,633,280

iii: The ratio between the highest payers (Celtic) and the lowest payers (Livingston) is 21.76 to 1, an enormous figurethat shows the league, despite having just 12 teams, has clubs with budgets ranging from low EPL level to England’s
sixth tier - all in the same ‘competition’.
iv: The top 10% of earners this season make 53% of all basic pay and they’re mostly Celtic and Rangers players. Only
three other leagues in this study are more ‘top heavy’ in this regard: Ligue 1, La Liga and the CSL.

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AFL ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, AFL, 2018 SEASONAUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE, AUSSIE RULES

2018

TOTAL SALARIES:£142,230,928$177,788,660
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£202,320$252,900

18TEAMS

PLAYERS703

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No16 LEAGUEMEDIAN SALARY:£192,002$107,521

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1Richmond£210,503$263,1282West Coast Eagles£206,662$258,328

3

Sydney Swans£206,630$258,287

4

Brisbane Lions£204,806$256,008

5

St Kilda£204,806$256,008

6

Carlton£204,796$255,995

7

Greater Western Sydney£203,381$254,226

8

Port Adelaide£203,366$254,208

9Gold Coast£203,352$254,190

10Western Bulldogs£202,375$252,969

11

Fremantle£200,925$251,156

12

Collingwood£200,915$251,143

13

Hawthorn£199,475$249,344

14

Adelaide Crows£199,044$248,805

15

Melbourne£199,044$248,805

16

Geelong£197,996$247,495

17

North Melbourne£197,594$246,992

18

Essendon£196,201$245,251

THE STATE OF PLAY

As ever, we highly recommend the AFL’s annual report for the granular detail on many aspects of the way the competition isrun - including salary expenditure - and the latest editions are available here: http://www.afl.com.au/afl-hq/annual-reports.
One reason we include the 2018 AFL season in this report (and not the recently finished 2019 season) is the annual reportprovides an excellent corroboratory source for the survey material we gather; the other reason is related and more prosaic some team information takes longer to piece together than others.
What isn’t in doubt is that, officially, the 18 team rosters included 703 players collectively earning AUS$253.9m which
equates to £142,230,928 at the prevailing exchange rate, and thus average pay last year of £202,320.
The AFL remains outstanding in one key aspect - the ‘fairness’ as measured by the difference between the club with thehighest average first-team pay and the lowest. A salary floor and ceiling for player payments helps with this.
Clubs with the biggest overall spending (the extra, in effect, being on more or better coaches, facilities and other auxiliary
spending) tend to win more. That’s too complex an issue for these few paragraphs and further reading on the AFL’s
Competitive Balance Policy is recommended.
But the cap model overall has been a demonstrable success since its introduction in 1987. The traditionally three richestand most successful clubs from Carlton, Collingwood and Essendon had appeared in 75 Grand Finals of 90 up to then (83per cent) and won 41 of them (46 per cent of all titles). In the 33 Grand Finals since 1987, the ‘big three’ have appeared in
11 (or 33 per cent) and won six (18 per cent).
This isn’t to say the AFL is perfect; far from it. But a league that so consistently pushes itself to consider competitivebalance issues is a ‘fairer’ league than most.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talked then Richmond, West Coast, Sydney and Brisbane would have thrived in 2018; in fact West Coast won
the Grand Final, Richmond reached the preliminary finals and Sydney were also in the finals series. But salary levels are so
close across the board, this is as likely to have been (almost) random as opposed to swung by pay.
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AFL ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAM

AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE, AUSSIE RULES

SUCCESS LEADS TO POPULARITY? SOCIAL MEDIA SAYS...
TEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALCollingwood

131,485

231,709

362,001

725,195

Essendon131,530

187,223

350,215

668,968

Richmond

96,088

238,686

282,666

617,440

Hawthorn

95,981

182,098

335,342

613,421

West Coast Eagles

84,186

190,678

319,589594,453

Carlton111,467

184,414274,598

570,479

Adelaide Crows

150,800

135,918

283,734

570,452

Sydney Swans

98,982

133,577

277,417509,976

Fremantle

75,850115,346

213,679

404,875

Port Adelaide

104,012

100,444

188,965

393,421

Geelong

18,438

164,732

203,982

387,152

Western Bulldogs

63,657

121,844

169,081354,582

St Kilda

80,232

96,182

163,387

339,801

Brisbane Lions

84,10593,707

144,221322,033

North Melbourne

68,78094,222

151,214314,216

Melbourne

13,461

92,687

142,484

248,632

Greater Western Sydney

55,46482,241

108,049

245,754

Gold Coast

56,61067,616

101,017225,243

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
Data: mid-November 2019

i: The three most successful all-time AFL teams are all among the top six in current global popularity: Collingwood at
No1, Essendon at No2 and Carlton at No6. The fourth and fifth most successful teams, Hawthorn and Richmond, areNo4 and No5 in popularity.

TOTAL FIRST-TEAM
SALARIES, CURRENT
ii: It requires as many as seven teams combined in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s total
SCOT PREM SEASON
popularity. This points to competitive balance.

£54,633,280

iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Richmond) and the lowest payers (Essendon) is 1.073 to 1, areally low figure only bettered by one other league in the GSSS 2019 in terms of intrinsic and “competitive balance” the IPL.
iv: The top 10% of earners this season make 40.1% of all basic pay. Seven other leagues in this GSSS are less ‘top
heavy’ in this regard, while 10 leagues are more skewed to fewer athletes.

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CFL ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, CFL, 2018 SEASONCANADIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE, GRIDIRON

2018

9

TEAMS

TOTAL SALARIES:AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:MEDIAN SALARY:£28,102,767$35,128,459£70,966$88,708

PLAYERS

396

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		

1Calgary Stampeders£80,735$100,919

2

Ottawa Redblacks£74,468$93,085

3

Saskatchewan Roughriders£73,686$92,107

4

Winnipeg Blue Bombers£71,410$89,262

5

Edmonton Eskimos£71,185$88,982

6

Hamilton Tiger-Cats£69,855$87,319

7

BC Lions£68,091$85,1138

Montreal Alouettes£64,806$81,008

9

Toronto Argonauts£64,463$80,579

No17 LEAGUE£48,399$60,050

THE STATE OF PLAY

As we note each year, the CFL has always been the toughest league from which to garner reliable numbers and that is
down to the almost religious secrecy of everyone involved, not least the teams and team owners. No source that could be
described as even vaguely public exists that tells us about player pay, and we can speculate why; certainly some players
are unhappy with their lot. But pointers from agents and insiders do allow insight, even if acquiring that takes a bit of extra
time, hence the ‘lag’ in seasons covered.
What’s remarkable, in a sport where team incomes vary hugely (50 per cent or more) and one team’s football operations
budget can be 25 per cent bigger than the next, is the slender difference in pay from top to bottom. This season, 2018,
was extended by a week from 20 to 21 weeks to provide extra recuperation time. The salary cap was set at $5.2m (Canadian), with the floor at $4.6m and individual minimum salaries at $54,000.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money talks, then we would expected the Stampeders to beat the Redblacks to win the Grey Cup (as happened)
after seeing off the Blue Bombers and Roughriders in the Division finals. The Blue Bombers got to that stage; the Roughriders didn’t. In such a small league with such narrow allowable bands, everyone should be in with a chance.
Seven different winners of the Grey Cup in 10 years points to a decent spread of honours. All nine current teams have
either won or been runners-up at least once each in the past nine years.

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CFL ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMCANADIAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE, GRIDIRONTEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALSaskatchewan Roughriders

227,325

83,679279,540

590,544

Montreal Alouettes

139,793

50,217

218,916

408,926

Winnipeg Blue Bombers

168,326

62,023

110,181

340,530

BC Lions

125,81243,384

161,331

330,527

Calgary Stampeders

147,761

61,168113,670

322,599

Hamilton Tiger-Cats

145,807

57,146108,940

311,893

Edmonton Eskimos

140,340

47,504

114,527

302,371

Toronto Argonauts

132,11093,904

63,403

289,417

Ottawa Redblacks

122,62145,59353,200221,414

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: In a bizarrely perverse quirk, there is a strong inverse relationship between all-time success in the Grey Cup andglobal popularity. The most frequent winners Toronto have fewer followers than anyone bar the Redblacks (formed2014), while the least successful team bar the Redblacks (the Roughriders) are most popular. Other teams are similarly
TOTAL FIRST-TEAM
effected.

SALARIES, CURRENT
SCOT PREM
ii: It requires as many as four of nine teams combinedin social SEASON
media numbers to amass more than half the league’s£54,633,280

total popularity. At a glance the social media wheel indicates balance.

iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Calgary) and the lowest payers (Toronto) is 1.25 to 1, a low
figure resulting from the narrow band between cap and floor. Balanced league.
iv: The top 10% of CFL earners this season make 42.2% of all basic pay. Eight other leagues in this study are less ‘top
heavy’ in this regard, and therefore have more balanced or ’fairer’ pay.

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WNBA ANALYSISAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, WNBA, 2019 SEASONWOMEN’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

20192020

TOTAL SALARIES:£8,660,798$10,825,998
AVERAGE SALARY PER PLAYER:£60,144$75,18112TEAMS

PLAYERS144

AVERAGE SALARY RANKING:

No18 LEAGUE

RANK
TEAM
			

AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, £AVG ANNUALPER PLAYER, $		1

Phoenix Mercury£65,367$81,7092

Chicago Sky£64,337$80,421

3

Atlanta Dream£63,278$79,098

4

Washingston Mystics£62,746$78,433

5Connecticut Sun£62,256$77,820

6

Las Vegas Aces

£62,100$77,624

7

Los Angeles Sparks£61,182$76,477

8

Seattle Storm£59,805$74,757

9Minnesota Lynx

£59,374$74,217

10

New York Liberty£56,576$70,720

11

Indiana Fever£54,136$67,669

12

Dallas Wings£50,577$63,221

MEDIAN SALARY:£47,774$57,329

THE STATE OF PLAY

The WNBA became the first women’s league in the world to be included in the main list in the GSSS in 2017 as part ofan in-depth look into gender (in)equality in global sport. You can read that report here: https://globalsportssalaries.com/
GSSS%202017.pdf
We explored not just the lack of opportunities for women to make a living (a living wage) in professional team sport but
the massive disparities between earnings for men and women who have them. The WNBA is the best paid women’s sports
league (as a whole) in the world. Yet pay levels remain fractions of those of men. This season, for example, the average
NBA salary of £6.66m for the men is 110 times as big as the average in the WNBA, where the figure is £60,144.
There are reasons for this, including not only the established structures and popularity that mean there is big money onoffer for TV deals and sponsorships in men’s sport, and much less for women’s sport. But this isn’t something that can’t bechanged and the GSSS 2017 explored the issues.
On the court in the WNBA in 2019, the Washington Mystics won their first ever finals, beating the Connecticut Suns 3-2 inseesaw best-of-five series after that pair of teams had finished the regular season with the best records, respectively 0.765
PCT and 0.676 PCT.
Stewart is one of more than 80 players who in recent years have finished the WNBA season and headed to an off-season
assignment with a foreign team, in her case in Beijing. While the WNBA is the pinnacle of women’s basketball in quality
terms, considerable financial rewards are available elsewhere, especially at a few teams in Russia and Turkey. China, South
Korea, Poland, Spain and Australia are among other destinations.

THE MONEY TALK

If the money alone had talked, then Phoenix Mercury, Chicago Sky, Atlanta Dream and the Mystics would have been in the
shake-up. They all made the post-season except the Dream, and the Mystics won the title. The three lowest payers - Dallas
WIngs, Indiana Fever and New York Liberty were three of the four worst performers, alongside the Dream, all with a PCT
below 0.4.
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WNBA ANALYSISPROPORTIONAL SHARE OF TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA BY TEAMWOMEN’S NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATIONTEAMTWITTERINSTAGRAMFACEBOOKTOTALMinnesota Lynx

91,08282,932

154,242

328,256

Los Angeles Sparks

75,463103,138

136,100

314,701

Phoenix Mercury

50,982

71,749123,972

246,703

Seattle Storm

54,326

72,05187,071

213,448

Chicago Sky

49,68675,61878,143

203,447

New York Liberty

40,67739,911

101,876

182,464

Indiana Fever

44,82743,05570,630158,512Atlanta Dream

42,31530,187

83,913

156,415

Washington Mystics

43,31761,51742,255147,089

Dallas Wings

22,82951,33959,255

133,423

Las Vegas Aces

31,27175,067

20,881

127,219

Connecticut Sun

29,40826,65027,97984,037

Data: mid-November 2019

SNAPSHOTS OF ORIGINAL MISCELLANY
i: The four most successful all-time NBA who are still in existence are one, two, three and four in the top four incurrent WNBA global popularity.

TOTAL FIRST-TEAM

ii: It requires as many as five teams combined from in social media numbers to amass more than half the league’s
SALARIES, CURRENT
total popularity. Another six are not far behind. This points to balance.

SCOT PREM SEASON£54,633,280

iii: The ratio between the highest payers in this league (Phoenix) and the lowest payers (Dallas) is 1.29 to 1, a low
figure and an indication of similarly resourced teams, and competitive balance.
iv: The top 10% of WNBA earners this season make 15.3% of all basic pay. No other league in this GSSS comes close
to such pay parity across all the sportspeople involved.

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The compilation of this report and its predecessors would not have been possible without theassistance of specialists across a number of sports and countries featured. Our thanks go to allof them, and those who helped in the wider production of this report, not least (in alphabeticalorder): Jonnie Baker, Matt Bourne, Katie Brazier, Omar Chaudhuri, Jasmine Collette, Alex
Dandanis, Alex Delvenakiotis, Arijana Demirovic, John Didulica, Frank Dunne, Magnus
Erlingmark, JP Francois, Victoria Fuller, David Gerty, Helen Harris, Ian Herbert, Sonja Hernandez,
Terri Jackson, Simon Jones, Chyloe Kurdas, Shaun Martyn, Scott Mann, Jean-Luc Martin, George
Milkov, Nick Pelekanos, Roger Pielke Jr, Becca Russo, Robin Scott-Elliot, Annette Seitz, Tina S,
Clea Smith, Eriko Takahashi, H.T Torres, Blake Webster, Rich Whittall, Pete Wilson, Blake Wooster,John Yan, Zhang Yi, Dan Zelezinski. There are dozens of others who gave freely of their timeand advice from inside clubs and leagues to help make this survey as accurate as possible but
contributed.

sportingintelligence

SPORTING INTELLIGENCE
CONSULTANCYSportingintelligence has undertaken journalistic and research projects on the business andfinance of sport for bodies ranging from football leagues in the UK and overseas to major media
companies including ESPN in the USA, as well as institutions including Lloyd’s of London, andfootball clubs from second-tier nationally to those among the top 10 in the world.
Our work has included this for the Premier League (https://issuu.com/markdavieslcfc/docs/
sportcal_premier_league_in_numbers_) and this for La Liga (https://www.laliga.es/en/news/
sportcal); and two projects for Lloyd’s of London that correctly predicted the World Cup winners
in 2014 and 2018, most recently here (https://www.lloyds.com/news-and-risk-insight/pressreleases/2018/06/dream-team); and collabotration with JLT on their injury index (https://www.
jltspecialty.com/our-insights/thought-leadership/sport-media-and-entertainment/footballinjury-analysis); and research projects with organisations including America’s Cup, ESPN The
Magazine and the EFL among others; private clients include individuals and their legal firms
seeking expertise for cases involving quantum claims for loss of earnings. By their nature theselatter cases are often secret, never disclosed, even when settled. Sportingintelligence clients
have settled individual quantum claims for more than £4m on multiple occasions.

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GLOBAL SPORTS SALARIESSURVEY 2018

GLOBAL SPORTS SALARIESSURVEY 2019

AVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, TEAM-BY-TEAM,
IN THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SPORTS LEAGUESAVERAGE FIRST-TEAM PAY, TEAM-BY-TEAM,
IN THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR SPORTS LEAGUES

349 TEAMS

350 TEAMS
18 LEAGUES
12 COUNTRIES
8 SPORTS
10,070 PLAYERS$22.6 BILLION IN WAGES

18 LEAGUES

13 COUNTRIES
8 SPORTS

10,089 PLAYERS$22.2 BILLION IN WAGES
1 AIM

1 AIM

THE

POPUL

ARITY

ISSUE

sportingintelligencesportingintelligence