MUMBAI: The Indian Premier League is the tenth highest paying league in the world, according to the 2017 edition of the Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) 2017, published by Sporting Intelligence.
In average average salary ranking however, IPL comes in as the number 3 league.
Total salaries in the IPL is $67,166,666 (£51,666,666) while average salary per player is $3,898,065 (£2,998,512).
On balance
The difference between the average Bangalore salary at the top of the IPL pay list (just over £4m annually when prorated from weekly sums) and the average Kings XI Punjab salary at the bottom (£2.2m) is wider than usual at a ratio of 1.9 to one – but still nowhere near as unbalanced as most of the GSSS leagues.
In some senses this short-form competition (in more senses than one), with its star-heavy but largely transient staff is an excellent canvas on which to build a competitive event. The salary cap assists that as does the player auction, with a play-off phase adding randomness.
Six different winners in 10 seasons represents a reasonable spread of success, while a seventh team, Bangalore, have finished as runners-up on three occasions. All of the teams playing in the 2017 season have either won the IPL or finished as runners-up at least once, aside from Gujarat Lions. They played just two seasons, 2016 and 2017, as one of the replacements for the Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals, suspended for alleged betting infringements. Chennai and Rajasthan will return in 2018 while stand-ins Gujarat and Pune will make way.
The money talk
In a small league with half the eight teams reaching the play-off phase, the winners from Mumbai and runners-up from Pune were two of the top three payers in average salaries, while the other two of the last four were the fourth and fifth best payers, from Kolkata and Hyderabad. Biggest payers Bangalore had the worst points record (7), and a win loss record of 3-10 with one ‘no result’.
Meanwhile, while the NBA remains comfortably the top paying league as a whole in world sport, by average salary at 7.1 million, the average Premier League weekly wage has broken the £50,000 barrier – a first for any football league.
The best paid 12 men’s sports leagues in this report comprise, 265 players at 257 clubs in six sports across 10 countries on three continents. These include athletes from the ‘big four’ leagues of North America in basketball, baseball, ice hockey and American football; from the ‘big five’ divisions of European football in England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France; from cricket in the IPL in India, from football in the CSL in China and from baseball in the NPB in Japan. Collectively they earn $20.4 billion at an average of $2.8 million each, per year.
The 18 leagues and 348 teams Sporting Intelligence considered in the main list start with the ‘big four’ from American sports, which are the NFL (gridiron, American football), the NBA (basketball), MLB (baseball) and NHL (ice hockey), continue with the ‘big five’ football leagues of Europe, which are the English Premier League (EPL), the Bundesliga of Germany, La Liga of Spain, Serie A of Italy and Ligue 1 of France, and include the AFL from Australia, CFL football (gridiron) from Canada, NPB baseball from Japan and IPL from India.
The leagues have led the way in attracting the biggest crowds in world sport over the past decade, as measured by average attendance within domestic professional sports leagues.
The final five leagues are the Scottish Premiership from Scotland, MLS from North America, China’s CSL and Japan’s J-League – all as examples of smaller-scale leagues from the world’s most popular sport, football – and the WNBA, the first women’s league in the GSSS.
For the NBA, the NHL and the NFL, the numbers in the report pertain to the 2017-18 seasons. For the Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and Scottish Premiership, the salaries are for the squads at the end of the 2017 transfer window as the 2017-18 season began. For MLB, MLS, IPL, NPB, CSL, J.League and WNBA the numbers are for 2017, and for the AFL and CFL they come from the end of the 2016 seasons.
Graphics courtesy: Global Sports Salaries Survey (GSSS) 2017, Sporting Intelligence
