Pep Guardiola to Manchester City: Manager to be paid more than any player as £21m wages dwarfs Wayne Rooney's £260,000-a-week

Guardiola will earn a reported £21m-a-year when he replaces Manuel Pellegrini at the start of the 2016/17 season

Pep Guardiola will replace Manuel Pellegrini at Manchester City at the end of the season (Getty Images)

Pep Guardiola will be paid more in wages than any player in the Premier League when he replaces Manuel Pellegrini as manager of Manchester City in the summer.

The current Bayern Munich head coach – who will leave the club at the end of the current season – is already the highest paid manager in the world, with his reported £13m-a-year salary dwarfing the likes of Arsene Wenger, Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho’s when he was still in charge at Chelsea.

But it’s emerged that Guardiola’s deal at the Etihad will be worth a staggering £12m-a-year, according to The Sun, and it will see his wages surpass his own players among the City squad as well as the Premier League’s current highest earner in Wayne Rooney.

At present, Rooney earns an unrivalled £260,000-a-week, totalling a welcome fee of £13.52m-a-year before tax reductions. With Guardiola believed to have signed a three-year contract with the Premier League side, he will take home an incredible £63m in salary alone should he see out the duration of his deal.

In terms of City’s squad, the current highest-paid players are striker Sergio Aguero and midfielder Yaya Toure, with both earning a reported £240,000-a-week to put them around £1m shy of Rooney’s annual salary and over £8.5m behind Guardiola’s package.

The news that Guardiola would take over at City next season came from the current incumbent Manuel Pellegrini himself, with the Chilean revealing that he would be leaving the club at the end of the season in his Monday press conference ahead of Tuesday’s Premier League trip to Sunderland.

Pellegrini earns a snippet of what his successor will receive from next season, with the 62-year-old currently paid £4.2m-a-year which puts him behind Wenger, Van Gaal and even Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp.

Wenger leads the chasing pack on £8.3m, with Van Gaal behind on £7.3m and Klopp a further £300,000 back, while the manager earning the most outside of the top four is Everton’s Roberto Martinez with the Spaniard paid £3m-a-year at Goodison Park.