This week’s news highlights the high-stakes world of player salaries. LeBron James recently signed a two-season deal with the Los Angeles Lakers worth 97.1 million dollars. In the NBA and other major American leagues, player pay is public and often discussed—part of the sport’s spectacle that fuels fan interest and debate.
In football, however, salaries are usually private. Most clubs keep compensation as a tightly guarded secret, which makes any leak or social post about earnings stand out. The case of Gerard Piqué, who revealed a portion of his earnings on social media, is a rare exception and immediately striking.
Experts note that football players sometimes prefer not to disclose their own figures while they are keen to know how much peers earn. This practice helps with benchmarking and negotiating higher wages, and it also feeds fan curiosity. It is a dynamic observed by Eric Luna and Federico Pasquetti, co-founders of Capology, a project that aims to shed light on football salaries.
10,000 players
Capology, which means roughly “salary cap study” in English, began in 2017 and has since expanded from the NBA to football. Today the project collects data on roughly 10,000 football players across European and American leagues. The information includes gross and net salaries, total contract values, durations, and renewal dates, among other details.
To understand how the project began, Luna, an American from Colorado, and Pasquetti, an Italian from Milan, met in Barcelona in 2015 while pursuing business management studies. Luna later described his aim to work with a team in the NBA, a driver that helped shape Capology’s focus. The founders emphasize their goal of building tools that can support clubs across sports by illuminating salary structures, even if football presented a steeper data challenge at first.
By 2019 they committed to football, and two years later they shifted focus more fully to the sport. They observed that data in the United States is widely accessible, while football has traditionally lagged behind in data openness. They saw a clear market gap and began to scale, acknowledging that the data landscape is evolving but still far from complete.
– Kylian Mbappé – PSG – €50 million net per year (including €100 million signing bonus spread over all years) – €30 million net per year (excluding signing bonus) – Capology tweet from July 5, 2022.
Two types of sources
The team behind Capology explains that data comes from two streams. One is publicly accessible and media-sourced, verified to be reliable for major leagues when sample sizes are sufficient. The other is private contacts with clubs, managers, agents, and players. This combination helps fill gaps where public data is scarce.
Capology’s growth relies on a network of dedicated resources. With a small team, they still manage to estimate salaries for a large pool of players. When direct data is missing, they use the known total payroll for a club and a validated method to distribute the rest across individuals. The approach is guided by a transparent algorithm that factors in player characteristics and contract structures, though fixed salaries are the main focus for now.
The site marks data with a green tick to show confirmed sources, while predictions appear where appropriate. Users can report potential errors, and the founders say they value correct, high-quality data, acknowledging occasional mistakes as part of an ongoing process.
La Liga’s clients
Capology lists several high-profile clients that include clubs from the English Premier League, the Championship, the Belgian League, Major League Soccer, and La Liga. For confidentiality reasons, the names of the clubs are not disclosed, but the platform serves agents, brokers, and external technology providers who work with football clubs. Much of the information remains freely accessible on the Capology website for public exploration.
In addition to contract data, Capology also compiles information on club finances. Founders say this broader dataset has proven useful for journalists and students, and in recent months they have integrated it into the software. The market’s pace is strongest in summer when contracts are renewed, which means updates stretch over several weeks. They are also expanding knowledge of South American leagues, a region of growing interest for many users.
The aim remains clear: to reduce silence around salaries in football. The founders believe that in a decade clubs may choose to disclose compensation openly, as all parties stand to benefit from transparency. Capology’s data indicates that the highest paid football talent varies by league and season, with notable earnings in La Liga and other top leagues as the market evolves.