[Steve AWOL]

Interesting article listing the biggest team wage bills in World sport: ESPN The Magazine - The Money Issue - 200 Best-Paying Teams in the World - ESPN

Here's the top 30 wage bills of football clubs for last season:

Rank | Team | Domestic League | Average Annual Salary Per Player (£)

1. Barcelona La Liga £4,775,894
2. Real Madrid La Liga £4,441,368
3. Chelsea Premier Lge £3,634,860
4. Inter Milan Serie A £3,622,122
5. Manchester City Premier Lge £3,539,981
6. Bayern Munich Bundesliga £3,489,735
7. AC Milan Serie A £3,409,606
8. Manchester United Premier Lge £3,082,739
9. Liverpool Premier Lge £2,979,884
10. Arsenal Premier Lge £2,872,666
11. Juventus Serie A £2,491,967
12. Aston Villa Premier Lge £2,323,264
13. Schalke 04 Bundesliga £2,128,494
14. AS Roma Serie A £2,042,868
15. Newcastle United Premier Lge £2,034,949
16. Valencia La Liga £1,767,531
17. Portsmouth Premier Lge £1,736,275
18. Werder Bremen Bundesliga £1,694,661
19. Stuttgart Bundesliga £1,609,928
20. Borussia Dortmund Bundesliga £1,599,760
21. Atletico Madrid La Liga £1,563,494
22. West Ham United Premier Lge £1,520,085
23. Sevilla La Liga £1,466,221
24. Hamburg Bundesliga £1,440,462
25. Tottenham Hotspur Premier Lge £1,427,671
26. Everton Premier Lge £1,343,005
27. Sunderland Premier Lge £1,262,957
28. Blackburn Rovers Premier Lge £1,259,546
29. Fiorentina Serie A £1,250,840
30. Fulham Premier Lge £1,229,770

No surprise about the top 2 clubs but am shocked to see Portsmouth in the Top 20!

[indiana44]

Quite interesting how much on a par the leading 5 English teams in the table actually were.

Spurs really very surprisingly low. Do they have a wage cap ? Surely their position must rise ( maybe already has to an extent ? ) if they are to match their supposed ambitions.

Also showing Portsmouth in particular but also West Ham were clearly ( as reputed ) paying beyond their means !

[Steve AWOL]

Originally Posted by indiana44

Quite interesting how much on a par the leading 5 English teams in the table actually were.

Spurs really very surprisingly low. Do they have a wage cap ? Surely their position must rise ( maybe already has to an extent ? ) if they are to match their supposed ambitions.

Also showing Portsmouth in particular but also West Ham were clearly ( as reputed ) paying beyond their means !

Afaik Daniel Levy has kept quite a tight grip on the wage bill at Spurs. Although we presumably must've paid handsomely for van der Vaart' services plus Gallas and an improved contract for Bale this season so not sure what the average will be at the end of this campaign.

Whether we will push the boat to try and compete with the big 5 on wages, so that we might get more Champions League football, seems to depend upon when the new stadium is sorted...

[Tel69]

Very surprised Spurs not higher in that list. Even more surprised the likes of Pompey, Villa, Sunderland so high. Quite incredible.

[theriddler]

Just goes to shw how tight fisted Levy is we're lower than sunderland!

Whoever thinks Harry will ruin spurs finacially needs to see this as proof of how strict our chairman is. Wages will obv go up to keep our players from going else where if/when we don't get champions league football, and if we push the boat out for a top quality striker.

[TommyGavin76]

It's a bit misleading quoting average annual salary, really distorts the figures. Would be more interesting to just have a total salary.

[ZicoZ]

Originally Posted by TommyGavin76

It's a bit misleading quoting average annual salary, really distorts the figures. Would be more interesting to just have a total salary.

..... plus signing on fees , bonuses and sweeteners , (cough ) Harry ...

[tennisman]

Puts a new spin on the '22 blokes kicking a pig's bladder around' view of football.

It's now '22 millionaires kicking a light plastic sphere around' (and not getting it past the 1st defender at corners)

[the chimp]

Originally Posted by TommyGavin76

It's a bit misleading quoting average annual salary, really distorts the figures. Would be more interesting to just have a total salary.

Its very misleading, we dont know how many players its divided by or how its worked out at all.

[Steve AWOL]

Here's some further info on how they got their salary figures:

Sports salaries « Sporting Intelligence - What the figures tell you

This database focuses on what players earn for playing sport. It does not include commercial deals away from the playing field. But it does seek to provide an accurate guide to average pay for top stars for playing their sport. This is not the same as taking a club’s headline wage bill and diving by X, Y or Z. Our data is produced by knowing which pots of cash pay the wages of the players we focus on.

So how do we make our calculations, in cases where the information is not laid out for public consumption by primary sources like various unions in the USA? To provide one example of how we do the maths, we can look to the English Premier League, and the most recent data from Arsenal, where the club’s headline wage bill for the 2008-09 season (the most recent season available) was £103,978,000.

Many people do not realise that headline wage figures include costs for all employees, in Arsenal’s case for everyone who works for Arsenal Holdings, all 384 of them, plus another 893 temporary personnel like stewards and waiters on match days. Those same headline figures also include not just wage / salary costs for all the above (and sometimes severance costs too), but social security and pension costs...

...in the period in question that Arsenal had 62 playing staff and 38 training staff, including their manager Arsene Wenger and his coterie of coaches, technical experts and so on, plus 284 other full-time staff and those 893 temps.

The figures in the sportingintelligence sports salaries database are calculated having stripped out the pension and social security costs (of more than £13m in Arsenal’s case in 2008-09), stripped out the training staff costs (millions more), and non-football staff costs and temp costs (ditto), and the costs for players who are not in the first-team set-up (ditto). We’ve done these sums and others like them, where required, for each sport, league, season and team.

English Premier League football wages are probably the least well known – accurately known, that is – of any sport in the world. We hope our database helps shed some light on this subject.

Maybe if there was more transparency with these figures by Premier League clubs then there would be less suspicion about the conduct of certain figures in the game...

[Season 74]

Originally Posted by TommyGavin76

It's a bit misleading quoting average annual salary, really distorts the figures. Would be more interesting to just have a total salary.

Yep. This suggests to me that Man United might be highest in the premier league due to their huge squad.