Ousmane Dembélé Tops Ligue 1 Salary Rankings as PSG Financial Dominance Continues

Ousmane Dembélé, the reigning Ballon d'Or winner, tops the 2026 Ligue 1 salary ranking published by L'Équipe on April 2, earning an estimated gross monthly salary of 1.5 million euros — more than three times the wage of the highest-paid player outside Paris Saint-Germain. The French international forward, who claimed the Ballon d'Or last September, leads a ranking utterly dominated by PSG, whose players occupy the first 14 positions in the entire French top flight. Marquinhos follows in second place at 1.12 million euros per month, with Achraf Hakimi and Lucas Hernandez tied in third at 1.1 million euros each. Warren Zaïre-Emery rounds out the top five at 950,000 euros monthly. The figures, drawn from L'Équipe's annual investigation into salaries across Ligue 1 and the major European championships, confirm PSG's financial supremacy over every other club in France.

Portuguese quartet all land inside Ligue 1's top 20 Four Portuguese players at PSG feature prominently in the ranking, with Vitinha and João Neves each earning 900,000 euros gross per month, according to reporting attributed to the newspaper A Marca and confirmed by L'Équipe's investigation. Vitinha, completing his fourth season at the club, and João Neves, in his second year in Paris, share identical salaries despite the difference in their tenures. Nuno Mendes earns 800,000 euros monthly, placing him in the top ten, while Gonçalo Ramos closes the top 20 with 443,500 euros per month. The ranking also notes that Denis Zakaria and Eric Dier, both of AS Monaco, sit at the bottom of the top 30 with 330,000 euros monthly — the lowest salaries among the elite group. The presence of all four Portuguese players inside the top 20 underlines PSG's policy of concentrating elite wages within a single squad.

L'Équipe has published its annual Ligue 1 salary investigation for close to a decade, making it one of the most closely watched financial disclosures in French football. PSG's financial dominance of the French game has been a consistent feature of these rankings since the club's Qatari-backed takeover in 2011. The report covers not only Ligue 1 but also the other four major European leagues, providing a comparative snapshot of football wages across the continent.

Höjbjerg leads non-PSG earners, Marseille fields eight in top 30 Pierre-Emile Höjbjerg of Marseille is the highest-paid player outside PSG, earning an estimated 500,000 euros gross per month and ranking 13th overall in the championship. His Olympique de Marseille teammates Mason Greenwood and Geoffrey Kondogbia each earn 450,000 euros monthly, the same figure as Lyon's Corentin Tolisso. In total, eight OM players appear in the top 30, making Marseille the second most represented club in the ranking. Among African players in Ligue 1, Hakimi leads the way, followed by Kondogbia of the Central African Republic at 450,000 euros and Morocco's Nayef Aguerd at approximately 400,000 euros per month at OM. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who returned to Marseille as a free agent after a spell in Saudi Arabia, earns 350,000 euros monthly — a significant reduction from the more than 600,000 euros he received during his first stint at the club, according to France 24.

Luis Enrique earns a million a month, women's game lags far behind Among coaches, PSG head coach Luis Enrique is the highest-paid manager in Ligue 1 by a considerable margin, earning 1 million euros gross per month. Paulo Fonseca, manager of Lyon, holds the second-highest coaching salary in the division at 350,000 euros monthly, ahead of Marseille coach Habib Beye at 230,000 euros per month. Across all five major European leagues, Kylian Mbappé and Vinicius share the top spot with 2.67 million euros gross per month each, with L'Équipe noting that the ranking does not include performance bonuses or premiums. In the Arkema Première Ligue, Tabitha Chawinga and Marie-Antoinette Katoto are the highest-paid women's players at 75,000 euros per month — a figure that represents roughly five percent of Dembélé's monthly earnings. The gulf between men's and women's football wages, as illustrated by L'Équipe's data, remains vast even at the top of the women's game in France.