PSG world's best paid sports team

Paris St. Germain, defending champions of France's football league Ligue 1 are the highest paid team in the world, according to the ‘Global Sports Salaries Survey 2015’ conducted by Sporting Intelligence. The report spans 333 teams playing 7 sports across 17 leagues in 13 countries.

The French champions, who were taken over by the Qatari Investment Authority in 2011, had an average annual pay of $9,083,993 (Rs. 59, 92,71,018) per player ahead of Spanish football club Real Madrid, who paid their players an average of $8,641,385 (Rs. 57, 00,72,168) per year.

Eight of the world’s top 10 earners were football clubs, with English Premier League (EPL) clubs accounting for four of those eight slots. However, the league with the highest average pay is not the EPL, but in fact the National Basketball Association (NBA).

The league with the second highest average pay is the Indian Premier League ( IPL) with the highest average earners being the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB). Overall, RCB ranked 41st overall, with an average annual pay of $4,503,571 (Rs. 29, 71, 00,579).

Out of all the major leagues surveyed, the IPL showed the least disparity in wages with the lowest earners Kings XI Punjab earning on an average, $4,039,750 (Rs. 26, 65, 02,307). That means the wage-ratio of the highest paid to the lowest paid team in the league was just 1.1.
Conversely, the French Ligue 1 and the Spanish Liga BBVA, home to the world’s two highest average-paid teams, were in 10th and 8th place respectively in the list of leagues with the highest average wages.

That meant that the disparity between the highest and lowest paid teams in this league was also on the higher side. The ratio between the average annual pay of PSG and Ligue 1’s lowest paid team, Guingamp was 20.12 times, while that of Real Madrid’s average annual wages and Liga BBVA’s lowest earners, Rayo Vallecano was 19.02.

The top 10 leagues included five football leagues – The English Premier League, the German Bundesliga, the Spanish Liga BBVA, the Italian Serie A and the French Ligue 1. Out of the remaining five, four were American franchise based leagues (The NBA, the MLB, the NHL and the NFL), whereas the IPL was the only one based in Asia.