News:
According to the figures by the website Sporting Intelligence Real Madrid is the sporting in the world with the second highest average salaries after New York Yankees:
Real Madrid players average salaries

The list from the UK publication states that the players in the Real Madrid first team squad made an average of 4,235,110 £ million Pounds a year for the season 2008/09. As of today’s exchange rate that would correspond to average player earnings of 4,708,546 € Euros a year or 6,339,615 $ million USD dollars.
The Real Madrid first squad consists of 24 players. According to the section 17.3 on page 55 of the club’s annual report the total expenses to salaries among the football players accounted for 145,023,000 € million Euros for the season 2008/09. One might expect that the vast majority of this money is shared among the first team players even though Real Madrid has several youth teams on contracts as well. So the average of dividing 145,023,000 into 24 gives a total of 6,042,625 € Euros. 4,708,546 (the figure according to the report by Sporting Intelligence) * 24 = 113,005,104 € million Euros. So there is a discrepancy of some 32 € million Euros between the amount published by Sporting Intelligence and the amount stated by the club in its’ annual statement. That difference may occur if the numbers by Sporting Intelligence are gross salaries while the numbers from Real Madrid include performance related bonuses. Plus of course that a certain amount is paid to players on the Real Madrid second team Castilla and on some of their youth teams + maybe the wages of the training staff is also included. But in any case the salaries of youth players and training staff can never amount to 32 € million Euros so the reason has to be another for this discrepancy. Most likely bonus related.

One might expect that with the big time signings of Ronaldo, Kaka, Benzema etc. for the season 2009/10 the player’s wages would rise significantly compared to the season 2008/09. However, the provisional budget for the season 2009/10 (see page 80 of the Real Madrid financial report 2008/09) shows only an expected rise in total payroll for the club from 187 € million Euros to 190 € million Euros for the season 2009/10. These preliminary figures do not specifically break out player’s wages and administrative staff’s wages but in any case the difference is not very significant.

The full list follows below. To see the figures listed in £ Pounds click here:
Sporting Intelligence top 10 highest paying sports clubs
To get the figures in USD $ check the following page:
World top paying sporting teams in dollars

Since we are dealing with Real Madrid here we will bring the list calculated in Euros though. The amounts are average salaries in Euros € for the first team squad. So a NY Yankees player would take in 5,2 million Euros on average:
1. New York Yankees: 5,197,215 € (baseball) (number of active players on 40 man roster 2009/10: 25)
2. Real Madrid: 4708546 € (soccer) (number of players 24)
3. FC Barcelona: 4521866 € (soccer) (number of players 24)
4. Chelsea FC: 3985967 € (soccer) (number of players 24)
5. Dallas Mavericks: 3951099 € (basketball) (number of players 2009/10: 13)
6. LA Lakers: 3790399 € (basketball) (number of players 2009/10: 13)
7. Detroit Pistons: 3713393 € (basketball) (number of players 2009/10: 14)
8. Cleveland Cavaliers: 3672787 € (basketball) (number of players 2009/10: 15)
9. Boston Celtics: 3631380 € (basketball) (number of players 2009/10: 14)
10.New York Knicks: 3628888 € (baskterball) (number of players 2009/10: 14)

So the reason why so many basketball teams are represented probably lies in the smaller team squads. While American football with +50 players on the roster might be lower down the list due to the art of the calculation which deals with “average” salaries. If the calculation had been for median salaries the list might look differently since there is usually a very wide spread between top earners and those at the bottom.

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