Barcelona remain the best paid team in global sport measured by average first-team wages, with Real Madrid in second place but Manchester City of the Premier League have stormed into the top three and continue to close the gap on the Spanish giants according to the Sportingintelligence Global Sports Salaries Survey 2012, published this week.

The average first team pay at Barcelona, employees of the world’s best player, Lionel Messi – has been calculated at £101,160 per player per week, or £5,260,313 per year in the period under review. That represents a year-on-year increase of 10 per cent at the Nou Camp as Barca hold their No1 spot.

Real Madrid’s players in No2 place earned £90,859 per week (£4.7m per year, a rise of six per cent).

First-team stars at City, at No3, earned an average of £86,280 per man per week, or £4.5m per year, the highest salaries ever paid in the English Premier League, the world’s richest football league. City’s numbers represent a 26 per cent year-on-year increase in average first-team pay and demonstrate the depth of the pockets of oil-rich owner Sheikh Mansour.

Another Premier League team, Chelsea, climb from No6 to No4 this year, with average first-team pay of £4.1m per player, a reminder they are hardly paupers, despite a perception in some quarters that their Russian petrodollar billionaire owner Roman Abramovich has eased off his spending recently, Sportingintelligence reports.