By Nick Harris

20 May 2015

Paris Saint-Germain are the best paid team in global sport according to Sportingintelligence’s Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) for 2015, compiled in association with ESPN The Magazine and published today.

Many of the best-paying teams have super-rich owners with multiple interests in sport. Stan Kroenke, worth $6.3bn, is the major stakeholder in Arsenal and his other teams include a second top-20 payer, the Denver Nuggets. John W Henry, worth $1.61bn, also owns two top-20 teams, Liverpool and the Red Sox, via his Fenway Sports Group.

The Glazer family, worth $4.4bn, own Manchester United of the EPL and the Tampa Bay Bucs of the NFL, at No131 on this year’s list. Mike Ilitch, worth $5bn, owns the Detroit Tigers at No12 and the Detroit Red Wings of the NHL at No92. James L Dolan, whose family wealth is estimated at $4.5bn, owns the New York Knicks at No15 and the New York Rangers of the NHL at No74. Russian billionaires Roman Abramovich and Mikhail Prokhorov also own ‘big’, rich teams in Chelsea and the Brooklyn Nets respectively.

Yet all of these mega-wealthy people look like financial small fry against the owners of PSG and Manchester City. Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, which draws from the same resources that fund PSG’s owners QSI, has an estimated $304bn under investment. The sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, which includes City’s owner Sheikh Mansour on its board of directors, has assets estimated at $773bn. The richest sports teams in the world are increasingly running on oil.

As well as having Qatari owners, PSG’s shirt sponsor is a U.A.E airline, Emirates, which also sponsors Real Madrid and Arsenal. Another of Real Madrid’s major sponsors is Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment company (IPIC), where Sheikh Mansour is chairman of the board.The New York Yankees are now part of a commercial partnership with Mansour through their joint ownership of an MLS team, New York City FC.

City’s other sponsors include Etihad Airways, telecoms company Etisalat and investment company Aabar, all based in the U.A.E, while Etisalat is also a sponsor of Barcelona, who have a shirt deal with Qatar Airways.

This is the sixth Sportingintelligence salaries survey and the starting point for the first one was to compare wages in the world’s most popular sports leagues, with MLS and SPL football included as examples of smaller leagues from the world’s most popular sport, football.

The report has expanded to include CSL football from China, J-League football from Japan, and Ligue 1 football from France. PSG’s wealth now makes that Ligue 1 hard to leave out. Had PSG been included last year, they would have been no higher than No10 in pay terms, and a year before that would have struggled to make the top 70.

The methodology and full listings are all available in the report, which has expanded this year to 120 pages to include three special studies linked to the wages and popularity of specific teams and players, plus a league-by-league analysis that considers pay, popularity, success and attendance, and how these intersect in each league.

One of the in-depth studies looks at the pay levels of different nationalities across Europe’s ‘Big 5’ football leagues, and finds that Belgians are best paid. The same study reveals the biggest payers at last summer’s World Cup. The full details and an analytical essay by Ian Herbert are in the report.

Another of the studies looks at the ‘origins’ of the sportsmen playing in North America’s ‘Big 4’ leagues -the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL. The study reveals which educational establishments, which states and which foreign countries deliver the most players, and the best paid, to each league. The data is mapped for each league, as in the examples above. Click to enlarge.

There is also a piece in the report by Roger Pielke Jr, asking to what extent we can identify the world’s ‘super clubs’ solely by social media. New to this year’s GSSS is a league-by-league breakdown of social media ‘fans’ for each of the 333 teams, and a comparison against the all-time title success of each team in their league.

Is it the most successful teams who have the most fans? Generally, but not always. The world is full of glory hunters. If your success was too long ago it might as well not have happened for Generation Internet.

Do the best paid teams generally perform better? Yes, but not always, and it depends how much the championship in question is ‘randomised’ with play-offs.

Is it possible to look at the salary distribution and social media share within leagues and tell whether they are ‘fair’ and promote competitive balance? See right. One of these leagues has a salary cap and an official competitive balance strategy, as well as huge crowds and a variation in the title winners. The other doesn’t.

Neither of these leagues is Ligue 1 of France, where the world’s best paid sports team reside. Not yet.