Barcelona top the list of the world’s best-paid football teams but the Premier League in England has a higher average wage than any of its rivals.
According to the 2017 Global Sports Salaries survey published today, the average Premier League weekly wage has broken the €55,000 barrier - a first for any football league.
England’s top two clubs, Manchester United (€5.891m) and Manchester City (€5.885m), have a €112,000-per-week basic average across their squads.
But the pair are still behind Spanish giants Barcelona and Real Madrid and France’s Paris St Germain.
LaLiga leaders Barcelona pay their first-team squad nearly €7.4m, numbers which includes Lionel Messi’s €562,000-per-week contract extension to 2021 - a deal agreed in July and signed yesterday.
Ambitious PSG, who signed Brazil superstar Neymar from Barcelona last summer, are just behind on €7.275m with European champions Real Madrid on €6.999m.
Chelsea (€5m), Arsenal (€4.538m), Liverpool (€4.1m) and Tottenham (€3.545m) are the next biggest payers in English football.
The average yearly Premier League pay in the 2017-18 season is €2,970,550 - or €57,125 per week.
Those figures are well ahead of Spain’s LaLiga (€1.888m), Italy’s Serie A (€1.495m), Germany’s Bundesliga (€1.416m) and France’s Ligue 1 (€1.062m).
The three best-paid teams in global sport all come from basketball’s NBA in the United States.
The Oklahoma City Thunder (€8.038m), the Cleveland Cavaliers (€7.78m) and the Golden State Warriors (€7.731m) top the list with NBA players having the highest average wages at €6.2m each this season.
Baseball’s MLB players are next on €3.8m and Indian Premier League cricketers, when weekly pay is pro-rated, receive €3.4m a year.
The GSS survey exposes the substantial gender pay gap in elite level sport.
The 12-team Women’s National Basketball Association in the United States paid an average salary of €64,645 for the 2017 season.
The Atlanta Dream are the biggest WNBA payers with an average weekly salary of €1,420, placing them just below Scottish Premier League pair Hearts (€2,065) and Hibernian (€1,883) but above Dundee (€1,295).
The WNBA’s €1,900 average paid to players per game was dwarfed by American Football’s NFL (€145,964), Premier League (€78,173) and NBA (€75,370).