By Aris Barkas/ barkas@eurohoops.net
It has become a yearly tradition for Eurohoops to present the Top EuroLeague salaries. The list contains very few new names with Shane Larkin and Nikola Milutinov being the big winners during the 2020 summer of uncertainty.
However, it has to be noted in the coronavirus era once more it proved to be very hard to cross-check the exact numbers, the different taxation around Europe creates one more issue that’s not easy to be resolved between net and gross numbers, plus, as usual, those numbers are not official and clubs neither confirm nor deny them.
Once more it has to be noted that the reported numbers are net US dollars – while many deals are signed in Euros – plus there are some big corrections compared to last season, especially in the case of Walter Tavares’ contract with Real Madrid, which will be analyzed case by case in the following text.
The bottom line for the total financial situation in next season’s EuroLeague is that the top players lost little to none of their income. The middle class gets the biggest pressure and it’s not easy to get one million dollar deals as it used to be, but on the other hand, the low-tier contracts remain pretty much the same.
EuroLeague salaries and budgets remain as a whole at the top of the food chain of European basketball, even if there are cases in which clubs like Panathinaikos, Zalgiris Kaunas, Bayern Munich, and Baskonia can’t spend the money they used to.