Erling Haaland’s £525,000 weekly wage is half as much again as any rival’s inside the Premier League, and the closest challenger on the individual earnings ladder is £175,000 a week behind him.
Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk sits second at £350,000 a week, having become the Anfield club’s highest earner after Mohamed Salah’s summer exit.
Inside City’s dressing room the gap is starker still. Omar Marmoush is the next-best-paid player at the Etihad on £295,000 a week, £230,000 shy of his Norwegian team-mate.
City £744,500 clear of Arsenal
The imbalance widens at club level. City’s weekly wage bill of £4,419,500 leads the Premier League, nearly three-quarters of a million clear of second-place Arsenal on £3,675,000, according to Planet Football’s 2026-27 ranking published on 11 August.
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At the other end of the table, promoted Coventry City’s payroll of £303,000 a week would need more than three months to match one week of City’s spending. Ipswich (£575,000) and Hull City (£354,450) fill out the bottom three, all of them newly up from the Championship.
Brentford, famously careful with a wage bill of £983,000, remain the only non-promoted club under a million pounds a week.
Cardiff on Sunday, Bournemouth next
That wage backdrop carries into a live fixture on Sunday, when Arsenal meet City at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium in the FA Community Shield. Kick-off is 3pm local time, with the curtain-raiser staged outside England for the first time in 20 years after Wembley was booked for pre-planned concerts.
Arsenal arrive as reigning Premier League champions, having ended a 22-year title wait last May under Mikel Arteta with a four-point cushion over City. Their rivals qualified for Cardiff as FA Cup winners, Antoine Semenyo’s flick from a Haaland cross beating Chelsea 1-0 at Wembley in May.
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City’s Premier League campaign begins the following weekend, at home to Bournemouth on Sunday 23 August. The 2026-27 season opens on Friday 21 August with Arsenal hosting Coventry at the Emirates.
Maresca’s first competitive match
Enzo Maresca leads City out at the Principality Stadium. Appointed on a three-year contract on 29 June to succeed Pep Guardiola, the Italian returns to the Etihad after previous spells in the academy and as Guardiola’s assistant during the treble season.
Haaland’s basic pay is anchored by output. His 27 Premier League goals last term made him the division’s top scorer, and his tally in all competitions for City has passed 150 since he arrived from Borussia Dortmund in 2022. The nine-and-a-half-year extension he signed in January 2025 keeps him at the club until 2034.
The Cardiff meeting is a single 90-minute fixture. The gap it sits inside runs the length of the season.
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