Salary comparison: NBA players vs. Premier League, NFL and MLB players
NBA players are among the highest-paid athletes in the world, even compared to their counterparts in the world’s other major sports.
In order to put into context the extent to which NBA players are well-compensated, we looked up the salaries of players from the English Premier League, National Football League, and Major League Baseball on Spotrac and organized them into tables.
Spoiler: Generational baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani will earn as much as Frank Jackson and Sterling Brown this season. And the highest-paid player in EPL, Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne, would be just the 36th highest-paid player in the NBA this year, between Brandon Ingram and Jayson Tatum.
More on that in the tables below. The third, fourth and fifth columns in each table will display the names of the EPL, NFL and MLB players whose salaries come the closest to what the NBA players in the first column make this season.