Bale, Chiellini, Insigne: MLS salaries revealed with Real Madrid icon just 23rd

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·18 October 2022

Bale, Chiellini, Insigne: MLS salaries revealed with Real Madrid icon just 23rd

A list of the highest earners in America’s MLS shows that Gareth Bale and Giorgio Chiellini took enormous pay cuts to move stateside.

The duo are two of the most iconic players of their era, with Bale in particular often being hailed as a leading star of his generation.

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Whilst at Real Madrid, the Welshman won a staggering five Champions League titles and, as you can imagine, earned a pretty penny doing so.

How much money was Bale on at Real Madrid?

As reported by The Daily Mail, Bale was on roughly $627,000-per-week in the Spanish capital.

That made him comfortably one of the highest-paid footballers on planet earth at the time.

Whereas for the 2022/23 season, that wage would have made him football's fifth highest earner.

His salary was so vast that it proved a sticking point in Bale attempting to find a loan move in the summer of 2020 and ended up with Madrid paying in excess of 50% of his wage when he did eventually end up joining Tottenham.

But in joining Los Angeles FC, Bale has taken a huge pay cut to the point where the star now earns $2.3 million-per-season. A figure which makes him only the 23rd highest-paid player in the MLS.

The 10 highest earners in the MLS

10. Jose Altidore (Toronto FC): $4.2m 9. Luis Araujo (Atlanta United): $4.4m8. Alejandro Pozuelo (Inter Miami): $4.6m7. Hector Herrera (Houston Dynamo): $5.2m6. Gonzalo Higuain (Inter Miami): $5.7m5. Douglas Costa (LA Galaxy): $5.8m4. Federico Bernardeschi (Toronto FC): $6.2m3. Javier Hernandez (LA Galaxy): $7.4m2. Xherdan Shaqiri (Chicago Fire): $8.1m1. Lorenzo Insigne (Toronto FC): $14m

Former Napoli star Insigne is by far and away the league's highest paid baller, earning nearly double that of Shaqiri in second place.

Plenty of other formerly European talent also find their home in the top 10; with Hernandez, Bernardeschi, Costa and Higuain all spending considerable portions of their careers on the continent.

Other notable MLS salaries

As previously mentioned, Chiellini earns a modest $1 million at LAFC. We say modest, it's still massive money, but for someone as decorated in the game as the Italian it might well be viewed that way.

Chiellini's wage means he doesn't even make the MLS's 25 highest earners.