Average player salary in the J-League 2019, by team

In the 2019 Japanese Soccer League (J1) season, the average annual player salary for the first team squad of Vissel Kobe amounted to approximately 1.57 million U.S. dollars. The team is headquartered in Kobe, a city in central Japan located in Hyogo prefecture, and plays its home games from the Kobe City Misaki Park Stadium (also known as Noevir Stadium Kobe). Vissel Kobe was the best-paid team in Japan’s first soccer division (J-1) by a considerable amount in the 2019 season.

Soccer vs. Baseball

In countries with major sports leagues in soccer or baseball, usually one of the sports has established a dominant position in terms of popularity and market size, such as Major league Baseball (MLB) in the United States, or the Premier League in the United Kingdom. In the case of Japan, this dominance seemed to be less pronounced. The balance appeared to tip in favor of the Nippon Professional Baseball League (NPB) when looking at it from a monetary perspective, as the average annual player salaries of baseball players were in general higher than soccer players' salaries. The one notable exception was Vissel Kobe, which remunerated its players more generously than the highest paying baseball teams in Japan. In terms of popularity, both sports received similar viewer ratings on TV, while baseball pulled ahead in terms of venue attendance.

International comparison of average soccer player salaries

Vissel Kobe’s average annual player salary in the 2019 season seemed disproportionately high, especially when compared to other J1 teams’ paychecks. Compared to player salaries in other soccer leagues such as the Premier League in the United Kingdom, La Liga in Spain, or Bundesliga in Germany, the salaries of J1 players were still somewhat moderate. Vissel Kobe was the only team paying an average player salary of more than one million U.S. dollars per year. In the Premier League, for instance, an average player salary of more than one million U.S. dollars was the norm rather than the exception.