Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal among the top ten best paid teams in world sport

They may have lost the title but it's not all bad news for City players

City's first-team players earn an average £96,445 per week (Getty Images)

Four Premier League clubs are among the top ten best-paid sports teams in the world, a study has found.

According to the Global Sports Salaries survey produced by sportingintelligence.com, the highest-placed English side is Manchester City, who pay their first-team players £96,445 per week on average.

They are joined in the top ten by their rivals Manchester United, who are sixth with £89,988, eighth-placed Chelsea with £83,713, and Arsenal in tenth with an average weekly wage of £77,963.

Sheikh Mansour, the owner of Man City (Getty Images)

Unsurprisingly, the four clubs are all owned by multi-billionaires, with Manchester City's Sheikh Mansour topping the list - he is on the board of the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi, which has estimated assets of $773bn.

However, even City's wage bill is dwarfed by that of PSG, who top the list with an average weekly wage of £101,898. The French club, who have won Ligue 1 each of the past three consecutive seasons, are the only sports team to break the £100,000 per week mark.

The list reveals the extent to which success on the football pitch can be connected to wages, with the four highest-paying Premier League clubs making up the top four of the Premier League. The pattern continues with the fifth- and sixth-placed sides, Liverpool and Tottenham, rounding off the English sides breaking into top 50. They occupy, respectively, 14th and 30th place overall.

On this basis, the report also exposes the extent to which Aston Villa, Newcastle and Sunderland have under-achieved this season - the three clubs are in the top-ten English clubs for wages, but all have battled against relegation during difficult campaigns.

There has been little to smile about for Villa this season (Getty Images)

Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich, three of the Champions League's semi-finalists, make the overall top ten, while the achievement of Juventus in reaching the final against Barca is highlighted by their relatively lowly 24th place.

While five of the top seven nations for wages reached the quarter-finals of the 2014 World Cup, two of the top three failed to progress from the group stages. Spain, who endured a dismal tournament, take the top spot, while Roy Hodgson's England, who fared just as abysmally, are in third place with an average weekly wage of almost £67,000.

Football pays the highest wages of any sport, taking up eight out of the top ten places. The other two are occupied by baseball franchises LA Dodgers and the New York Yankees.

The Premier League was also found to pay the best wages of any football league in world, with an average weekly salary of almost £43,000.

Download the full Global Sport Salaries survey from sportingintelligence.com here