Premier League wages could build 36 new schools, figures show

Premier League clubs are spending vast sums on player wages, with the six highest-paying sides accounting for almost 55% of the division’s total wage bill.

According to figures from Spotrac, reported by the British newspaper The Sun, current champions Arsenal lead the rankings with an annual wage bill of £175.24m, despite not having any of the three highest-paid players in the Premier League.

Erling Haaland is the division’s best-paid player, but Manchester City’s total spending on wages is £9.52m lower than Arsenal’s. Liverpool, whose captain Virgil van Dijk is the second-highest earner, rank third with a wage bill of £165.1m.

Manchester United are fourth at £157.97m, followed by Tottenham in fifth on £118.82m and Chelsea in sixth with £114.07m.

The scale of the figures highlights the distance between Premier League finances and the economic reality faced by many of the competition’s supporters.

The average UK house price was £273,000 in July 2026. On that basis, the money paid to Premier League players would be equivalent to buying 5,978 homes.

National Health Service nurses earn between £37,000 and £42,000 a year, meaning the league’s wage spending could fund between 38,857 and 44,108 additional nursing jobs.

Building a new school costs an average of £45m, so the annual wage budget could instead be used to construct 36 schools.

The report also said the combined earnings of only 542 players in England’s top division were comparable with the gross domestic product of some smaller countries, including Cape Verde, who participated in last summer’s World Cup.

The six clubs at the top of the wage table spend a combined £896.92m. The remaining 14 Premier League teams together spend £732.49m.

Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham and Chelsea therefore account for about 54.9% of the league’s total wage bill.

Average spending among those six clubs is £149.5m per team, compared with £52.5m for each of the other clubs. That means the average wage bill at one of the six leading spenders is nearly 2.85 times higher.

At the other end of the rankings, the three lowest-spending teams – Ipswich, Hull and Coventry – have a combined wage bill of £48.15m.

Their total represents almost 3% of all Premier League spending on player wages.