The forming of the Premier League in 1992 saw money pour into the game like never before.
Television revenue made up the bulk of it, with BskyB putting a whopping £304m into club coffers, to secure the exclusive rights to broadcast their games.
But the clubs themselves weren’t exactly slow to capitalise on football’s sudden rise in popularity. In addition to financially benefiting from bumper crowds, merchandise sales, along with other commercial gains, soared.
It's fair to assume therefore that players also reaped the rewards of this rebranded version of English football becoming an immediate success, and they absolutely did.
The highest paid player in the top-flight during that inaugural season was Liverpool’s John Barnes on £10,000 a week and that is not to be sniffed at given the era. Just a few years prior it was still common for footballers to take up second careers post-retirement to make ends meet.
What is fascinating and staggering in equal measure however is the extent in which this sudden bonanza has risen in the years since. It has exploded really. That is a more accurate description.
Ten years after Barnes was taking home ten grand a week, Manchester United’s Roy Keane became the highest paid player in the Premier League.
His weekly wage was £94,000, an increase of 900%. Keane was unquestionably one of the best Premier League midfielders of all time but was football in danger of detaching itself from all reality?
It was, and it hasn’t found its way back since.
That’s because a decade later, the biggest earner in the top-flight was Carlos Tevez at Manchester City. He was making do with £250,000 a week, and at least this time the rise is ‘only’ 300%. At least there’s that.
So jumping forward another ten years, to the present day, who is the player with the bulgiest pay packet and what is he on?
That would be City’s Kevin De Bruyne, whose annual salary of just shy of £21m equates to a mind-boggling £400,000 a week.
That’s a four-bed semi-detached house in Didsbury every seven days. That’s 800,000 Freddos every matchday.
Moreover, it only gets more bewildering when it’s acknowledged that such a colossal amount doesn’t even include bonuses, a considerable income booster for every player.
Indeed, should we include appearance bonuses and other guaranteed top-ups it has been reported that Erling Haaland receives an eye-watering £865,000 per week, a figure that easily makes him one of the best remunerated players in world player.
Interestingly, that still leaves him miles behind Cristiano Ronaldo at Al Nassr.
Like Keane, the Norwegian superstar is a unique talent who directly effects the sports betting, thus greatly improving his team’s chances of success, so no doubt City will insist he’s worth every penny.
They certainly wouldn’t have agreed to such staggering sums otherwise. But still, these are numbers that are hard to compute.
For the record, Haaland’s ‘basic’ wage is £375,000 a week, making him the second best paid player in the Premier League, with Mo Salah and Casemiro joint-third, scraping by on £350,000.
It feels an awfully long time ago when John Barnes was king and paid what was perceived to be a king’s ransom.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to Alamy*
