Manchester City players are the best-paid sportsmen in the world, according to a new survey, Yahoo reported.
The English League Cup winners came in top of Sporting Intelligence’s 2014 Global Sports Salaries Survey, with their first-team squad members reported to earn an average annual wage of €5,864,675 over the course of 2013-14. Real Madrid are football’s second highest paymasters, paying their players almost €5.5m per year on average, while Barcelona come third with a mean first-team salary of just under €5.4m.
Bayern Munich are the only other non-Premier League club to be included in the top 12 of the survey, with their players collecting the seventh-highest salaries in sport. Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal also made the dozen clubs on the list.
While Real Madrid and Barcelona have some of the world’s most well-known players on their books in the shape of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi respectively, Manchester City have a string of high-earning stars on their wage bill. Yaya Toure, Sergio Aguero and David Silva are all reported to be earning more than €250,000 per week, bumping up their first-team average to a weekly wage of €112,000.
Source: FARS