This fantastic chart really illustrates just how huge a player he is.
Clint Dempsey’s salary following his return to MLS has been widely publicised.
$5m is an awful lot to guarantee one player, especially in MLS. But did you know that that could cover the entire payroll of Vancouver Whitecaps, a team four places higher in the Western Conference than Seattle Sounders?
Or how about Chicago Fire’s Bakary Soumare, who takes up almost double the cap space of teammate and MLS golden boot leader Mike Magee?
Steve Fenn, aka @SoccerStatHunt, has created a fantastically interesting graph to visualise facts like these.
Finn has taken every team in the league and created a bar out of their total wage bill, the bar’s length representing the amount of money spent. The bar is then divided into smaller fragments, each one representing a player and its size representing their wage.
Take a look at the chart below, hopefully there won’t be any nasty surprises for your team. Alternatively, an interactive version is available here.
Click to enlarge.