The real reasons Premier League salaries keep increasing

Professional athlete salaries have climbed across most sports over the years. And they just keep getting higher. Look no further than the most well-compensated Premier League player in 2025 as proof.

To be sure, pro-athlete salaries have generally been sky high. They certainly eclipse the average person’s annual take-home. More recently, though, they have ascended at more significant rates, right along with the value of pro sports franchises .

The reason for this is two-fold. First and foremost, sports are now one of the only live-television draws left around. Beyond that, the money brought to the table by the best sportsbooks online also helps inflate player salaries.

How? Why? Let’s talk about it.

Let’s first take a look at how starkly Premier League salaries have climbed.

According to data from Salary Leaks , the average weekly salary in the Premier League in 1995 was around $3,950 . Fast forward three decades, to today, and the average weekly salary now sits just over $69,600 .

Suffice it to say, this is a monstrous increase. In fact, it comes out to nearly an 1,800 percent upswing. For reference, the average American household’s salary has increased by just under 260 percent during this same span.

So yes, we are absolutely talking about outlier growth.

Putting butts in seats at a prescheduled time has become the hardest thing to do in the entertainment industry. Streaming services have changed.

Even weekly scripted programming fails to solicit the audiences it once did. Binge-watching shows on stream services has turned appointment-viewing television into a relic of the past.

Heck, even the movie industry has changed. Theatrical releases still drive revenue, but box office numbers are touch-and-go when so many streaming services also have films debuting on their own platforms that people can watch without leaving their home.

Live sports are… different.

Since sports are unscripted, they can assure advertisers and league partners large-scale audiences will be available at a certain time. What’s more, they can play on the fear of missing out (FOMO!). It is one thing to wait a few days before watching the season finale of Severance on Apple TV. It’s another thing entirely to watch a Chelsea vs. Manchester United matchup after it happens. The experience loses something when the results are already known.

For the most part, this allows each league to command lucrative broadcast-network deals. We are talking billions of dollars per year in many cases.

The Premier League is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Their most recent domestic TV deal is a four-year pact worth around $8.7 billion . Mind you, this is a deal that had many believing live-TV rights were actually on the downswing.

And look, if you are talking in raw terms, they might. Media rights deals may not be increased on a percentage basis as drastically. That speaks to the complications of live television in general. Still, the fact that live sports rights are growing at all is a misnomer in the entertainment industry. The product the Premier League promises is unlike any other across the sector. So while its media rights deals may not be exploding in value with each new contract, their broadcasts are among the crown jewels of an entire industry.

Ever since the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act back in 2018, every individual state has gained the ability to legalize sports betting (or not) on its own terms. This has opened up the floodgates for league partnerships.

In the Premier League alone, you see everything from advertisements to stadium marketing to jersey patches that nod to a sports betting site or physical sportsbook. That is extra money in the pockets of both teams and the leagues.

By extension, then, some of this money gets funneled back to the players. It’s a simple ripple effect. Premier League clubs generate more revenue because of sports betting, and some of that gets passed down to the players.

This is all a big reason why nine Premier League players are making the equivalent of $15 million U.S. in 2025. That’s a record.

Don’t get too used to this number, though. It’s going to change. As in, it’s going to go up. Because as of now, Premier League salary growth shows no signs of slowing.