UAE, Qatar-backed football clubs are world's biggest paymasters

Qatar and the UAE owned clubs are the biggest paymasters in the sports world with Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) topping the list.

Now, thanks to the largesse of the club’s owners, Qatar’s PSG’s players are the best paid team of professional sportsmen in the world, in any sport, bar none.

This sixth edition of Sporting Intelligence’s global sports salaries survey (GSSS) calculated average first-team pay at Paris Saint-Germain at $9 million (Dh33 million), which equates to $174,692 per week (Dh 641,119).

Qatar’s PSG is followed by Real Madrid which enjoys sponsorships of Dubai’s Emirates airline and Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Co.

Real Madrid players on average earn $8.64 million annually or $166,180 a week while the UAE-owned Manchester City players pocket $8.59 million per annum or $165,343 a week, according to a survey of wages conducted by Sporting Intelligence and ESPN The Magazine.

Owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister of UAE and Minister of Presidential Affairs, Manchester City have topped the payers list in the past two surveys and are at No. 3 this time.

Dubai’s Emirates airline is the club’s shirt sponsor along with sponsorships of Real Madrid and Arsenal which are the among the top dozen payers. Another of Real Madrid’s major sponsors is Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company.

Among Manchester City’s other sponsors are Etihad Airways, telecoms company Etisalat and investment firm Aabar, all based in the UAE. Etisalat are also a sponsor of Barcelona, the No. 4 payers, whose lucrative shirt deal with Qatar Airways is worth more than €30 million a year.

Qatar’s backing has transformed Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) since 2011. That was the year Qatar Sports Investments (QSI) took a 70 per cent stake, completing a full takeover in 2012 and pouring hundreds of millions of euros into the team.

QSI, an arm of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, spent a French record of around £90 million net in their first season on transfer fees for new players including the Argentine midfielder Javier Pastore, for a fee of around €40m, then a record for Ligue 1. They splashed a similar amount for Brazilian defender Thiago Silva before the 2012-13 season when net transfer spending exceeded £125 million on stars also including Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Milan.

In 2013-14, the net spending was around £100 million, of which more than £55 million was spent on Uruguayan forward Edinson Cavani alone. Before the 2014-15 season, Brazil’s David Luiz was bought for not much less than that, making him the most expensive defender of all time.

At the time of writing, PSG’s first-team squad has cost around £300 million in transfer fees to assemble (or €420 million, or $450 million at today’s rates), or an average of £20 million (€28 million / $30 million) for each of the 15 players for whom a fee was paid.

In total, $17.94 billion were spent in wages on 9,731 sportsmen from 333 teams across 13 countries in seven sports. 

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