Reports reveals that Premier League wage bill is more than double the next biggest-spending league

In a first for UEFA’s Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, England's top flight paid €2.69 billion to players to dwarf the wages paid by the second-placed league

Eden Hazard is on the top wage at Chelsea, the top-spending club in the Premier League in 2015 (Photo: Getty)
A new report have revealed that The Premier League paid more than twice as much in wages to players than any other European league.
The unprecedented figures are shown in UEFA’s Club Licensing Benchmarking Report for the 2015 financial year.
It says the spending on players alone for England’s top flight was €2.69 billion, an average wage bill per club of €134.5m.
Clubs from the second top spending competition, Italy's Serie A, paid a total of €1.309bn in wages at an average of €65.5m across its 20 clubs.
Third of the pile was the German Bundesliga with €1.251bn, an average of €69.5m per annum for their 18 sides.
“For the first time on record, the total wage bill of the highest-paying league (English Premier League) was more than double that of the next highest-paying league (Italy’s Serie A), with the strength of the British pound in 2015 just pushing the English clubs over this line,” Goal.com quotes the report.
“The aggregate wage bills of the 20 Italian, 20 Spanish and 18 German top-division clubs continue to converge and are within five per cent of each other, with Germany third on aggregate wages but now second on average club wages.”
Unsurprisingly, Barcelona and Real Madrid’s wage bills were top with wage bills of €340m and €289m respectively.
Chelsea were third with €284m worth of wages paid in 2015, with Manchester City (€276m) and Manchester United (€266m) next.
The top 10 was filled by Paris Saint-Germain (€255m), Arsenal (€250m), Bayern Munich (€236m), Liverpool (€216m) and Juventus (€198m).