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France Football have released their annual ranking of the highest paid coaches, and once again Jose Mourinho has been revealed to be the world’s top earner. The Portuguese coach earns €15.9 million as a basic salary, but with sponsorship deals with companies including Heineken (€4.5 million a year until 2020), EA Sports and Adidas, his total annual income reaches €28 million.

Mourinho is certainly no stranger to France Football’s salary list: he has been the highest paid coach in the world 12 times since the rankings were first released in 2004. The only coaches to have knocked him off top spot were Sir Alex Ferguson (needless to say, also of Manchester United) in 2004 and Chelsea’s Luiz Felipe Scolari in 2009.

The Premier League dominates the top 20 for another year with nine entries, and China follows with four of the world’s top paid coaches including national team coach Marcello Lippi and – somewhat surprisingly – Tianjin Quanjian’s Fabio Cannavaro. There are six Italian coaches in all, the most of any nation, even though there is only Serie A coach in the top 20, Massimiliano Allegri of Juventus.

top-paid-coaches

The highest paid Italian is, of course, Lippi, but in actual fact the majority of his €23.5m salary (10% of which goes to his assistants) is paid by Guangzhou Evergrande – the team he agreed to join last autumn before taking charge of the Chinese national team.

His Italian compatriots are spread among four countries: China (Cannavaro, who led Tianjin Quanjian to promotion to the Chinese Super League last year), Germany (where Carlo Ancelotti is in charge at Bayern Munich), Italy (Allegri, now in his third season with Juventus), and England (Leicester City hero Claudio Ranieri and Antonio Conte, whose Chelsea side look set to unseat Leicester as Premier League champions).

There are also three coaches in the list who are no longer in a job: Laurent Blanc, Louis van Gaal and Claudio Ranieri. Blanc is ranked third thanks to the €20 million payoff (two years’ pay) he received from Paris Saint-Germain last summer, while van Gaal received €10.2 million in compensation when he was replaced by Mourinho at Manchester United. Ranieri’s pay was boosted by a €3.1 million bonus and sponsorship deals with companies including Sky and TAG-Heuer.