Manchester City has the highest wages

According to an ESPN ranking, footballers of the English giant have the best earnings. The average annual salary is 8 million dollars.

One grew up struggling through life in poor Africa, the other played football every single day from childhood in Argentina. Despite coming from different worlds, they have something in common. Yaya Touré and Carlos Tevez are leaders in the team that pays the highest wages of all sports clubs in the world. According to the ESPN The Magazine ranking, it is the English football giant Manchester City that pays its players the highest salaries. On average, the club pays each player eight million dollars per year. This is mainly thanks to Sheikh Mansour, the wealthiest owner in English football. His fortune is estimated at 30 billion dollars. “He is the owner who constantly pumps money into the club. For him, it’s no problem to lure players with astronomical sums,” football agent Jozef Tokos told the Economic Daily.

The sheikh who pays royally
Touré – 14 million dollars. Tevez – also 14 million. These two players are the best-paid footballers in the team of last year’s Premier League champions. Thanks to them, the club climbed from third to first place in this prestigious ranking. And why is it City that dominates wages in world sport? The answer is simple: Sheikh Mansour, who entered the club in 2008. “It’s Arab millions, and he simply has an unlimited flow of money. In other words, he can buy whoever he wants,” explained Július Bielik, well-known football agent and former Czechoslovak international, to the Economic Daily.

But there is also a downside: Manchester City is the most indebted team in the Premier League (with debts of 123 million pounds). Yet if they want to compete with the world’s best football clubs, they have no choice. “City doesn’t have the history of its rival from Old Trafford. In practice, this means the sheikh has to pay more in wages compared to United,” said Tokos. Paradoxically, even the highest-paid players don’t always deliver the needed success. Manchester City is the perfect example: under Mansour’s reign they have won one English title, but in the Champions League they failed twice in a row to progress even from the group stage to the round of sixteen. (...)