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Big leagues, big salaries, but how they compare? This is something that has been interested me for a long time since our local Finland's top league SM-Koris has been more competitive for last few seasons than ever. Therefore, as I had time during Summer, I decided to make comparison between other top leagues and see which leagues are most competitive. Of course, I can't compare skills but I can compare salaries which give at least some kind of idea how competitive leagues we are talking about. So during last Wednesday and Thursday (July 17th and 18th, 2024) I manually calculated all player salaries from top10 countries' top leagues based on NT Ranking + Utopia Heaven and Finland top league (as it was easy to get). So what are the most competitive leagues based on average salaries? Here are the stats:

1) Spain 996k
2) Finland 988k
3) China 973k
4) Germany 946k
5) Israel 938k
6) Greece 917k
7) France 899k
8) Poland 895k
9) Netherlands 867k
10) Hong Kong 866k
11) Lithuania 863k
12) Latvia 850k
13) Belgium 847k
14) USA 845k
15) Utopia 828k
16) England 823k
17) Bulgaria 784k
18) Italy 729k

At least for me, it's really interesting to see that in the top3 leagues (Spain, Finland, China) teams are paying almost 1 million weekly salaries on average but in some leagues (even big countries) you can operate with 200k less salary costs on average.

One thing I know is that there are still big countries missing from the list and I would love to get more data from BB Community. So if your country (or any country that you find interesting) is missing from the list, please let me know the average salary of that country's top league and I will add it to the list. Also, if you want to update any of the countries, you can also let me know and I will make the corrections and add date when salaries were updated.

Last edited by Lappa at 8/13/2024 3:32:38 AM

Germany
Big 8 Great 8
1)1 057 000 1 235 000
2)982 000 1 142 000
3)969 000 1 045 000
4)935 000 837 000
5)790 000 1 070 000
6)952 000 1 075 000
7)830 000 870 000
8)688 000 673 000
=$7 203 000 + $7 947 000
=$15 150 000 /16
Average= $946 875

Correct, these are average salaries of all 16 teams in the league. So basically I summed all salaries from every player in rosters and divided the total by 16.

I was thinking about the tanking teams, but I thought that 1) most of leagues are anyway having usually 1-2 teams that are more or less tanking and 2) that is also part of the competitiveness as if 1-2 teams are tanking, it's automatic win for other teams which is lowering the overall talent in the league

I was also trying to use BuzzerManager but I was able to get data from my own league, not any other leagues so it helps a bit but would require inputs from other BB Communities.

Greece
Big 8 Great 8
1)948 000 1 059 000
2)1 047 000 967 000
3)970 000 1 150 000
4)935 000 884 000
5)873 000 1 052 000
6)983 000 920 000
7)855 000 878 000
8)505 000 652 000
=$7 116 000 + $7 562 000
=$14 678 000/16
Average= $917 375

England $823,500

German 1st ligue is $ 956 951 when you count the last 2 teams with minimum salary, actually $ 711 178

Yes right i didnt know the salary floor of first league.
ex your team has actual salary 673k so i counted this amount

France
Big 8 Great 8
1)943 000 1 080 000
2)861 000 933 000
3)993 000 1 002 000
4)1 068 000 899 000
5)715 000 923 000
6)1 015 000 721 000
7)847 000 861 000
8)806 000 727 000
=$ 7 248 000+ $7 146 000
=14 394 000/16
=Average $899k

Notices
1)6th team in big 8 has only 3 wins until now with 3rd highest salary in league
2)No one still didnt win the BB3 from France yet