Premier League vs NBA: Cleveland Cavaliers become best-paid team in the world... while Paul Pogba is the only footballer on top 30 salary list

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The Cleveland Cavaliers have become the best-paid team in world sport, with average first-team pay at the reigning NBA champions standing at £6.5million per man, while Manchester United have become the best-paid football team in the world, with average basic pay this season of £5.77m per man.

Both findings have been revealed by Sportsmail from a global sports salaries survey of almost 10,000 elite sportsmen across 333 teams in 17 leagues across seven sports.

The NBA as a whole is the best paid sports league in the world, with their stars earning an average of £4.8m per year each. This enormous sum in pounds has been bolstered by the effects of Brexit on the dollar-pound exchange rate but also by a massive rise in pay in the NBA thanks to a new TV deal.

Cleveland Cavaliers, pictured winning the NBA Finals, are the highest paid team in the world

LeBron James earns a staggering £24.5m a year, the most of any NBA and Premier League star

The Premier League is the best paid football league in the world by far, with average basic salaries this season of just over £2.4m per man. This is about twice as much as the next best paid league, Spain's La Liga.

Here, in more detail, we compare the world's most popular league in the world's most popular sport (the Premier League) with the world's best paying league, the NBA, which comes from arguably the only other truly global team sport, basketball.

SALARIES

The NBA has 30 teams, with 449 players on the current rosters for the 2016-17 season. Their total earnings combined this season (for playing, not endorsements or sponsorships) will add up to £2.17 billion, or £4.83m per player on average. This a big leap of around $2m per man per year on last season because of new TV deals in the NBA. Those new deals with Turner and ESPN cover the next nine seasons and are worth £2bn a year, a huge 180 per cent leap on the previous deals, worth £740m a year.

Manchester United are the biggest football team in the world in terms of player salaries

The NBA has just signed new TV deals which have boosted player salaries across the league

The Premier League also has new TV deals in force from this season, both domestically and internationally. The new three-year contracts with Sky and BT are worth £5.14bn or £1.7bn a year, and the new overseas deals are worth £3bn over three years, or £1bn per year. So the main TV deals combined are worth £2.7bn a year.

The Premier League, despite having fewer teams, has more players in the current first-team squads than the NBA, or 527 against 449 by the close of the summer transfer window. This group of players have average salaries of £2.4m.

There are big variations on pay across teams within both the NBA and Premier League. The Cavaliers at £6.5m per year on average earn more than twice as much as the lowest paid team, the Philadelphia 76ers, who must scrape by on 'only' £2.9m per player this season on average.

In the Premier League, United's £5.77m is six times more than the lowest paid team - by average salary - which is Burnley, where the first-team players earn just under £1m a year, or about £20,000 per week.

Philadelphia 79ers are the lowest paid team in the NBA, scraping by on 'only' £2.9m per player

Sean Dyche's Burnley are the Premier League equivalent, whose players earn under £1m a year

TOP EARNERS

The top earner in the NBA is LeBron James of the Cavaliers on £24.5m for this playing contract this season, or $31 million. There are now 109 NBA players who each earn $10m or more this season, or a staggering one in four of all players.

The corresponding figure in the Premier League of players earning $10m or more (£7.9m) is 20, or one player in 26. The Premier League's highest paid player is Manchester United's Paul Pogba on around £15.1m a year.

The NBA's superiority in pay for top stars is perhaps most dramatically illustrated by a list of the top 30 players from the NBA and Premier League combined. The Premier League's top player Pogba would just squeak onto that list in 30th place.

Paul Pogba is the only footballer to make it onto the list of top earning sports stars, in 30th

Kevin Durant is joint second in the top 30 list, earning a huge £21m a year at Golden State

ATTENDANCE

The dramatically different sports have obvious differences in attendance, no surprise when the NBA is played in indoor arenas and the Premier League in stadiums.

Over the last completed season, 2015-16, the average NBA attendance was 17,864 per game, and at individual teams this ranged from 14,000 to 22,000 per game on average.

In the Premier League in 2015-16, the average attendance was 36,451 fans per game, ranging from an average of around 11,000 at Bournemouth to 75,000 at Manchester United. The Premier League has the second highest average attendance in world football after the Bundesliga.

The NBA's indoor setting means attendances are some way lower than the Premier League

The total number of paying fans is greater in the NBA, at 21.97m last season against 13.85m last season in the Premier League because of the higher number of games, 1,230 against 380.

The NBA is more expensive than the Premier League to attend, with an average ticket price of around £46 per game, although there are huge variations between teams, against an average ticket price in the Premier League of £31, according to new Premier League figures. (Again, there are massive variations in the Premier League. That £31 average is lowered by lots of concession prices and early bird season tickets).

GLOBAL ALLURE

The NBA can justifiably call themselves a global property known in countries around the world, where the top teams (the Lakers, Celtics and Bulls, and more recently the Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors), are well known to general sports fans. The NBA is huge in North America, quite big in other parts of the Americas, popular across Europe and especially in the Balkans, and among the most popular of all sports leagues within China, where a £110m-a-year broadcast deal is the NBA's biggest foreign rights earner by a long, long way. The NBA earns about as much from the rest of the world combined, outside the USA.

The Premier League is, by a large margin, the most popular global sports league outside its own borders, attracting big audiences (relative to other sports leagues) across hundreds of countries and territories. The hardest bottom-line evidence of the Premier League's global popularity is the amount of money it earns from overseas's broadcasters, or £1 billion per year.

The NBA have teams, like the Los Angeles Lakers (pictured), who are known around the globe

COMPETITIVE BALANCE

If you had suggested a few years ago that the Premier League was competitively balanced, you would have been laughed out of town. For what seemed like an age, or most if not all of the seasons from 2001 to 2010, the 'Big Four' of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool annexed the title and the top four places. Manchester City and Tottenham have since become more consistent challengers, while the miracle of Leicester last season showed a 'smaller' club can win the title.

There have now been four different PL winners in four seasons (Leicester, Chelsea, City and United), and that could yet become five in five if Arsenal, Liverpool or Tottenham win this season.

Leicester's title win last season has improved the Premier League's competitive balance

Over the past decade there have also been four different Premier League winners, those listed above, plus another two teams finishing second, Arsenal and Liverpool. Four winners in 10 years in a 20-team division is a rate of 20 per cent of teams winning, with 30 per cent of teams finishing in the top two.

Things are not so different in the NBA, in percentage terms. There have been seven different NBA finals winners over the past 10 years - the Cavaliers, Golden State Warriors, San Antonio Spurs, Miami Heat, LA Lakers and Boston Celtics. 

Two further teams have been losing NBA finalists: Oklahoma and Orlando Magic. So the ratio of winners is 23 per cent of NBA teams have won in a decade (seven of 30), and 30 per cent (nine in 30) have finished in the top two, as in the Premier League.