Kaka May Be the Best-Paid Player in Italy, But Real Would So Totally Pay Him More

By: Martha | September 11th, 2007

He belongs to Jesus. There’s a long article in today’s La Gazzetta (and of course it’s not online) detailing the salaries of each team, from the high rollers like Kaka and Francesco Totti to the poverty-stricken trio on the bottom, Marco Mancosu, Jan Koprivac and Simone Iacoponi, all of whom make only €40,000/season.

Not surprisingly, Ricky Kaka tops the Table of Riches with an after-tax salary of €6 million, followed by The Great Totti — who earns €5.4 million — and a quartet of players on €5 million: Adriano, Gigi Buffon, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Patrick Vieira (man are Inter getting ripped off by two of those guys). There are also a slew of players making between €4 and 5 million/year, among them Alex Del Piero (on €4.8 million), David Trezeguet (€4.5 million), Walter Samuel (whose €4 million/year is yet another sign of Inter’s brilliant money management) and eight people from Milan.

As you might expect given those numbers, Milan’s total wage bill (€120 million) is tops in the league, and not a single player on their roster earns less than €1 million/season. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Inter are only €10 million behind which, given the massive amounts they’re paying people to sit on the bench, isn’t exactly a shock. Juve are next on just under €100 million, but there’s a substantial gap between them and the fourth biggest-spending club, Roma, who pay out “only” €59 million every season.

More interesting to look at is the other end of the pay spectrum, where eight teams (including Lazio, who managed to budget their way into the Champions League) don’t have a single player earning as much as €1 million. Empoli, Siena, Atalanta and Cagliari all pay out between €11 and 12 million/season total, with Empoli and Cagliari not paying a single person more than €450,000.

It’s two entirely different worlds, isn’t it? The desperate struggle for survival (not just in Serie A, but in general) on one end, and a battle for who can spend most spectacularly at the other. I mean, imagine someone from Inter or Milan trying to survive even a single day without a plush locker room and club employees at their beck and call — they’d go into shock within hours.

Edit: Marco managed to not only find the salary charts online, but also to paste them into his blog, so they’re easy to see over here.