The sheikh from Paris pays the most in sports

The most lucrative paychecks in sport do not go to athletes in elite overseas leagues like the NHL in hockey or the NBA in basketball, nor even to footballers in the richest league in the world – the English Premier League. The answer to where athletes are paid the most lies in the Global Sports Salaries Survey 2015 by the U.S. company ESPN. The highest wages are paid by Qatari sheikh Hamad Al-Thani to the footballers of his club Paris Saint-Germain. Each year, the star-studded team led by Zlatan Ibrahimović earns an average of more than $9 million.

“Before the entry of Qatari capital, Paris was not even among the ten most successful clubs in French history. Now it has won its third consecutive title and has become one of the richest clubs in the world,” noted ranking author Nick Harris.

The jumper from under the Eiffel Tower
Before 2011, that is before Qatari millions entered the club, Paris Saint-Germain ranked among the average teams not only in Europe but even in France. But over the last four years, it has been climbing to the economic summit faster than anyone else. “Paris’s first place in this ranking surprises me. But since the French league is not as attractive to players as leagues in England or Germany, the club’s representatives try to lure them mainly with high salaries,” sports analyst and football agent Jozef Tokos told the Economic Daily. The club can afford increasingly higher wage expenses mainly thanks to its enormously growing revenues in recent years. For context, according to the auditing company Deloitte, the Eiffel Tower club’s revenue was exactly 100 million euros – last year it reached 474 million. Paris Saint-Germain has thus joined the world’s richest teams, right behind Real Madrid, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, and Barcelona.

Building the brand through mobile
While Paris cannot match the quartet of football giants in the number of trophies won or the prestige of the domestic competition, it is trying to catch up at least in popularity – through modern technologies. Its latest move is to build the international strength of its brand via a smartphone game called Rushin Paris. In this fun free-to-download app, the team bus gets stuck in traffic. Your task is to run with the players through the streets of Paris and reach the Parc des Princes stadium in time for kickoff. The game has sixty levels and is available in sixteen languages.

Football and the others
Looking at the Global Sports Salaries Survey 2015 as a whole, it is clear that the most lucrative job in sports is to be a footballer in one of the top clubs. Eight of the top ten in the ranking are football clubs. The only exceptions are two teams from the U.S. Major League Baseball – the Los Angeles Dodgers in sixth place and the New York Yankees in ninth. “Football is several times more popular and watched than any other sport in the world. For example, matches of Manchester United are watched by people in the USA, South America, and Africa, whereas baseball is dominant only in America,” said Jozef Tokos. The popularity of football is best illustrated by the number of fans clubs have on social media – Real Madrid and Barcelona each have more than 80 million, while the most famous baseball team, the New York Yankees, has only eight million. And how many does the most popular NHL club, the Chicago Blackhawks, have, with our Marián Hossa on its roster? Barely three million.