By Aris Barkas/ barkas@eurohoops.net
The summer market of 2021 remains a continuation of everything that happened in 2020. The world of sports is still trying to recover from COVID and the times when getting a two-million contract per season in the EuroLeague was a reachable target for a number of top players seems to have passed for good with some unique exceptions.
That’s why this year presenting the Top10 of the EuroLeague salaries proved to be a relatively easy task since in most cases the questions were centered more on the re-negotiations which were made for longer contracts and more affordable salaries than anything else.
In theory with the new EuroLeague Framework Agreement between the EuroLeague and the players’ union (ELPA) in place, that might be the last summer in which an unofficial account of the top EuroLeague salaries is published from Eurohoops.
The agreement includes a ten-tier system for the players’ salaries starting from 250.000 euros and getting up to 3,5 million or more, which will be known to all EuroLeague clubs and give a more solid base of transfer negotiations. However, unfortunately, this piece of information is not expected to be public, so the mystic surrounding Euroleague salaries might remain the exact numbers would be always open to debate.
Once more, the numbers mentioned in this post are calculated in US dollars for comparison reasons with NBA salaries. Plus several EuroLeague countries don’t use euros as their currency and the numbers represent net salaries. That is the most tricky part in getting right the final numbers since taxation is different depending on the country and on some occasions, taxes go down, as it happened recently in Greece, or go up, like in Turkey where taxes are raised this year from 17% to 37%. However if you want to compare with NBA salaries, where half the money goes to IRS, just multiply each Euroleague contract by two.
Still, the bottom line is simple: Nikola Mirotic remains the highest-paid player in Europe and that’s not going to change anytime soon and EuroLeague champion and MVP Vasilije Micic is the only really big winner of this summer with a contract that very few had in the history of European basketball.