Highest Paid Football Managers: Simeone Leads on €35m

Diego Simeone is reported as the highest-paid manager in world football, on around €35 million a year — about £30.1 million — at Atlético Madrid, following a contract extension in November 2023. Comparable pay guides across other sports sit in our salaries and earnings hub.

Before the table, the caveat that governs the whole subject: no club discloses what it pays its manager. Every number below is reported rather than disclosed.

Manager	Club or nation	Reported annual pay
Diego Simeone	Atlético Madrid	~€35m (~£30.1m)
Pep Guardiola	Manchester City	~£20m, excluding bonuses
Carlo Ancelotti	Brazil	~€10m
Unai Emery	Aston Villa	~£8m
Arne Slot	Liverpool	~£6.6m

Why every figure here is an estimate

Manager pay does not appear as a separate line in published club accounts, and clubs do not announce it. The figures in circulation come from journalism, agent briefings, or inference from movements in a club’s total wage bill.

The NBA sits between the two extremes — salaries are reported rather than published, but corroborate closely across specialist outlets, with Steve Kerr on $17.5 million. See our guide to the highest paid NBA coaches.

One branch of elite sport does not have this problem. American college football coaches are employed by public universities, so their contracts are disclosable — which is why our list of the highest paid college football coaches can be checked and this one cannot.

Rugby union has the same disclosure problem and far smaller numbers: its best-paid coach is reported at around £800,000, roughly 4% of Guardiola’s figure — see our guide to the highest paid rugby coaches.

That produces genuine, large disagreements — and they are not all errors. The same contract can be reported at very different numbers depending on what is being counted:

• Basic salary or total package. Guardiola’s reported £20 million explicitly excludes bonuses, which at that level can be substantial.
• Gross or net. A net figure and a gross figure differ enormously, and tax regimes differ between Spain, England and Brazil.
• Annual salary or contract average. A back-loaded deal averages higher than its first year pays. We resolved exactly this problem in our guide to the highest paid WNBA players, where one player’s $1.4 million salary and $1.67 million contract average were both reported as her pay.
• Currency and conversion date. €35 million converts to a different sterling figure each year.

So the honest reading of the table is that Simeone is clearly first and Guardiola clearly second, and that positions further down are ordered on figures too soft to defend precisely.

The figures to distrust

One in particular. David Moyes has been reported at £12.5 million a year at Everton, which would place him in the global top ten and above both Emery and Slot.

Treat that with caution. It sits well outside what Everton’s wage structure would ordinarily support and above managers at clubs with far larger revenues. It may reflect a total package, a contract average, or simply a figure that entered circulation and was repeated. We include it because it is widely reported, and flag it because it does not fit.

That is the general test worth applying to any salary list: does the number make sense against the club’s revenue? Where it does not, the figure usually deserves less confidence than its precision implies.

For scale at the other end of the same pitch: the best-paid Premier League referee earns around £250,000, roughly one-eightieth of Guardiola’s reported salary — see our guide to Premier League referee salaries.

Managers do not out-earn players

At the top of the game, the best-paid players earn multiples of their manager. Simeone’s reported €35 million draws attention precisely because it approaches player territory, which is unusual rather than typical.

The structural reason is straightforward: a club employs one manager and twenty-five players, and the transfer market prices individual playing talent competitively in a way the managerial market does not. There are far fewer buyers for an elite manager than for an elite forward.

Who is actually paying

Manager salaries sit inside a wage bill funded by broadcast and commercial revenue, and ultimately signed off by the owner. Eleven of the twenty Premier League clubs are now American-owned, as our guide to who owns the Premier League clubs sets out — so a substantial share of English football’s managerial pay is now authorised from outside the country.

Competition revenue is the other side of that equation: UEFA expects to distribute €2.437 billion to clubs in 2026/27, covered in our guide to Champions League prize money. Qualification for that competition is, for most clubs, what makes an elite managerial salary affordable at all.

How we checked these numbers

Simeone’s €35 million and the November 2023 extension, Guardiola’s reported £20 million excluding bonuses, Ancelotti’s ~€10 million with Brazil, Emery’s ~£8 million and Slot’s ~£6.6 million are drawn from PlanetFootball, GiveMeSport’s global and international rankings, Football Earnings and MatchBingo’s Premier League salary list.

None of these figures is disclosed by a club or verifiable from accounts. We have said so at the top rather than in a footnote, ranked only where sources broadly agree, and explicitly flagged the one reported figure that does not fit its club’s circumstances. Readers should treat the order below the top two as indicative.

Review class: seasonal, plus event-driven. Recheck each summer and on any managerial change or contract extension at a major club.