Peter Tanyanyiwa
With the new season in full-swing, Spotrac have revealed the staggering table of stats showing just how much Prem clubs spend on their players’ salaries.
Current champs Arsenal sit at the very top of the pile, despite not having any of the top three highest paid players.
Instead, the league’s highest-paid star Erling Haaland sees Manchester City come in £9.52million behind the Gunners.
And second-highest earner Virgil Van Dijk watches his Liverpool squad reel off a £165.1m bill in third.
Man Utd’s payroll comes in fourth, at £157.9m a year.
The mind-boggling sums spent on players’ wages per year shows how disconnected the Premier League is the with the real world of their supporters.
The average price of a UK home is £273,000 as of July 2026.
This means the money handed to the superstars of the league is equivalent to buying 5,978 houses.
NHS nurses earn between £37,000 to £42,000 annually, so the Premier League could afford anywhere between 38,857 to 44,108 new nurses.
New schools cost on average £45m for each one, so the budget spent every year on salaries could be used to build 36 new schools.
The money earned by just 542 stars who play in the top-flight is also equivalent to the Gross Domestic Product of some small countries, like Cape Verde who competed in the summer’s World Cup.
The top six clubs in the table spend together a huge £896.92m, while the remaining 14 teams have a combined total of £732.49m.
That means that Arsenal, City, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham, and Chelsea account for about 54.9 per cent of the entire league payroll.
The average for the Big Six is £149.5m compared to a comparatively humble £52.5m per club for the rest — roughly 2.85 times more per club.
And looking at the other end of the table, the bottom three —Ipswich, Hull, Coventry — have a combined total of £48.15m.
That is roughly three per cent of the Prem’s total spend on salaries. —Sun.
Online Reporter