Athletes enjoy some of the highest sports salaries throughout the entire world and because of this the issue of top paid athletes is highly contentious. Enormous and life changing amounts of money are associated to football player salaries and sports salaries. These are the sports salaries the top paid athletes receive for their sporting profession alone, excluding the amount of money they receive from additional streams such as sponsorship.

Ten Top Paid Athletes:

• The top paid athlete in global sport is Argentina and Barcelona’s Leo Messi. Messi enjoys one of the most lucrative football player salaries and is on a £29.5 million contract.
• David Beckham may not be one of the best players in the world any more but he is one of the best paid players. Beckham earns £27.2 million from his current deal with American side Los Angeles Galaxy.
• The world’s most expensive football player, Cristiano Ronaldo, is third on the list. Ronaldo has one of the best football player salaries with Real Madrid at a staggering £26.8 million, which is set to increase.
• Fourth on the list is Brazilian player, Kaka. Kaka earns around £16.8 million from his contract with Real Madrid, which means he has one of the best sports salaries.
• Frenchman Thierry Henry is next on the list and the former Arsenal and Barcelona player enjoys around 316 million for his football talents.
• Ronaldinho used to be one of the top paid athletes in the world but he has dropped down the list to sixth over time. Ronaldinho still earns around £15 million from playing football under his current deal at AC Milan.
• Number seven is Carlos Tevez. Tevez was criticised for moving to Manchester City but they offered him a £13.7 million deal, which would have been very difficult to say no to.
• Eighth on the list is Zlatan Ibrahimovic formerly of Barcelona and now an AC Milan player. Ibrahimovic has enjoyed a very good salary wherever he has been and currently earns in the region of £12.9 million.
• Chelsea’s Frank Lampard is the ninth best paid player in global football. He has long been hailed as one of Chelsea’s most important players and a salary of £12.6 million keeps him just inside the top ten.
• The final player in the top ten is Samuel Eto’o of Inter Milan and formerly of Barcelona. Eto’o is on virtually the same terms as Lampard but earns slightly less at £12.3 million.

The main criticism of top paid athletes is that they do not do enough to justify the huge amounts of money that they are paid. These football stars earn hundreds of thousands of pounds more per week than the average Brit who may quite rightly do more work to make ends meet. The issue of football player salaries has always been widely discussed within the media and society.

A number of things have led to these ballooned sports salaries. The number of foreign owners that are now involved within football has enabled clubs to spend more money. This has meant that clubs are able to play higher prices and offer higher salaries in order to attract the best players. Football also enjoys a great deal of exposure and this encourages sponsorship. Sponsorship in football is producing more money than ever before and this again means that top paid athletes are offered more by their parent football clubs. The average wage for a top-flight player between 2000 and 2006 increased by 65 per cent and between 2006 and 2010 the average top-flight salary has gone up by roughly £124,000. Even the best players two leagues below the Premier League in England have contracts in excess of £150,000 per year.

However, despite the criticism, which is often involved within United Kingdom football, it’s important to keep UK sport in context with the rest of the world. Some of the sports salaries and contracts in the United States are far more excessive than in the UK. Alex Rodriguez of baseball side the New York Yankees is currently on a deal worth $275 million. This is not uncommon and the reasons for high salaries are the same reasons behind high football player salaries. American, British and other stars have been enjoying huge salaries for a long time but it’s simply a by-product of everything that has developed and matured beside sport.

The problem for a lot of football clubs and sports clubs is that the top sports sides in the world have set a level of spending, which is very difficult to match. English football is now littered with examples of clubs that have been docked points and relegated because they have not been able to maintain the salaries of top paid athletes. Alternatives are being looked at such as salary caps because the amounts the sports stars earn is only going to increase over the next few years.

Football clubs are now viewed as business in the modern sports world and this attracts entrepreneurs looking for a way to decrease their own levels of personal debt. This places extra strain on football clubs and makes it difficult to maintain the salaries demanded by the best players at that football club. Success for football clubs brings extra revenue. This revenue is spent to attract and pay the best players who will bring a better chance of retaining that success.