Philadelphia Union player salaries as of April 15, 2022

The MLS Players Association published its latest round of salary data on Tuesday, giving us the year’s first view of how much money the Union’s players are earning.

Atop the headlines are the pay figures for the Union’s two new Designated Player strikers. Mikael Uhre is earning just over $1.5 million, and Julián Carranza is earning $900,000 as part of the contract the Union took on when they took him on loan from Inter Miami.

Uhre only has one goal in his Union account because of a quad injury that has nagged him for weeks. Carranza has tallied four times, making him the team’s No. 2 scorer this year behind Dániel Gazdag — whose salary figure is just $586,250.

Many Union players got big raises as a result of contract extensions signed last year. They include goalkeeper Andre Blake and defenders Olivier Mbaizo, Jakob Glesnes, and Jack Elliott — the last of whom got a raise of more than $450,000. Few fans would argue against Elliott having earned that for his stellar play at centerback over many years for the club, after being the 77th pick of the 2017 college draft.

» READ MORE: Union’s Jack Elliott gets well-deserved contract extension through 2024

Around the rest of the league, there’s a new No. 1 salary for the first time in two years. Chicago Fire midfielder Xherdan Shaqiri, signed to bring the Windy City some long-awaited star power, is banking not just the highest salary in the league, but the highest salary in league history at $8,153,000. That’s on top of the $7.5 million transfer fee Chicago paid to acquire him from French club Lyon.

Unfortunately for Fire fans, Shaqiri has just two goals and one assist in nine games so far, and his team is stuck in last place in the Eastern Conference.

Shaqiri is one of 86 players across MLS earning at least $1 million this year, topping the league record of 81 set last year. The number has grown every year since 2013, when there were just nine millionaires in the league. And it’s a long way from the first year the MLSPA published salaries, 2007, when there were just four millionaires on the books.

It’s expected that Shaqiri’s place atop the standings will be overtaken this summer when Lorenzo Insigne joins Toronto FC. When he signed his deal in January, multiple outlets said the Italian winger will earn around $15 million a year before taxes. That would make Shaqiri’s half-a-season reign the shortest of any top earner on record.

Another new entrant in the millionaires club is former Union striker Kacper Przybylko, who’s now the main target of Shaqiri’s playmaking in Chicago. When the Fire traded for Przybylko, they said they’d give him a new contract that the Union didn’t want to sign. That duly happened, and Przybylko’s salary is now just over $1.2 million.

» READ MORE: A look back at last year's Union payroll

What other names stand out on the list of 841 players across MLS’s 28 teams? Here are two.

New Los Angeles Galaxy playmaker Douglas Costa, a Brazilian who won Germany’s Bundesliga and FIFA’s Club World Cup with Bayern Munich, is earning $3 million. The 31-year-old has just two goals and no assists in 10 games. There’s a growing chorus of critics in SoCal, understandably, given the Galaxy’s history of signing big-time stars who deliver.

In the Eastern Conference, expansion team Charlotte FC is paying its marquee striker Karol Świderski just under $2.3 million. Charlotte has endured its share of bumps in its first season, but Świderski has scored four of the team’s 10 goals.

Surveying the landscape as a whole, MLS teams are paying a total of $396,958,992 to players. That is yet another record total, fueled by another year of expansion, increased salary caps, and general competition on the world market.

The average salary is up to $472,008.31, the median salary is $248,333, and the lowest salary in the league (which is set by the CBA) is $65,500. Fifty-five players earn that sum — a tally that makes the minimum salary the most common one league-wide for now. None of those players is on the Union, while Atlanta, Charlotte, and Miami top the chart with four players each.

Note that all data is as of April 15, the date of MLS’ roster compliance deadline. Any players signed after that are not included.

Each player’s salary figure officially includes two numbers: the base salary and the guaranteed compensation. The latter number includes signing and guaranteed bonuses, plus marketing bonuses and agents’ fees, annualized over the term of a player’s contract, including option years.

For conversational and reporting purposes, the guaranteed compensation figure is the one commonly used around the league.

» READ MORE: The Union’s Olivier Mbaizo dreams of the World Cup after being part of Cameroon’s qualification

The annotations in parentheses mean the following:

1 — Designated Player

2 — Cap hit bought down below Designated Player threshold with Targeted Allocation Money

3 — Young Designated Player; his listed 2021 salary is what Inter Miami paid him last year

4 — Loaned out to another team. De Vries is with the youth team of Italy’s Venezia; Oravec is at FK Zeleziarne Podbrezová, a second-division team in his native Slovakia. Both loans expire this summer.

5 — Homegrown player

6 — Portella was a Union reserve last year and isn’t officially on the Union’s roster. But because the reserve team was unofficial, he and a number of other players were counted on the MLS payroll by the MLSPA. Portella also is currently out with a torn ACL suffered last December. The Union hope he’ll return in the summer and go to the reserve team.

7 — Sorenson also was a Union reserve last year and was a hardship call-up to the first-team bench for last year’s COVID-hit Eastern Conference final. Because his salary was counted by the MLSPA last year, it’s listed here this year.

It’s important to note that salary data does not include transfer fees, which are an ever-greater portion of MLS teams’ budgets. Just because a team is ranked down the list here doesn’t mean that team doesn’t spend on transfer fees. But the payroll comparison is still a snapshot of how teams handle the salary part of the equation.

It’s also important to note that players who are loaned out internationally usually still are counted on the MLS Players Association’s books. That has a significant impact on the payroll rankings.

Atlanta United is ranked No. 1 in part because of Esequiel Barco, who’s currently at Argentina’s River Plate and likely won’t play for the Five Stripes again. But for MLSPA accounting purposes, Barco and his $2.2 million salary are still listed with Atlanta.

For uniformity’s sake, all players listed in the MLSPA’s records are included in the calculations here, whether they’re big names or not.

Click here to see last year’s team payroll comparison.

The aforementioned total of 86 players across MLS earning at least $1 million per year in guaranteed compensation does not include four players who are loaned out internationally: Barco, Leandro González Pírez (Inter Miami to River Plate), Alexandru Mitrita (New York City FC to Greece’s PAOK), and Rodolfo Pizarro (Inter Miami to Mexico’s Monterrey).

Blaise Matuidi also is on Miami’s books even though he isn’t on the active roster. He was at the center of the salary reporting scandal that led to a multimillion dollar fine. Officially, the World Cup-winning French midfielder is now a team ambassador.

If all five players were playing in the league, the number of millionaires would be 91. They are included in the list below to put their on-paper salaries on the record.

As is tradition in this feature, the last section is devoted to players who are on the MLSPA’s books but aren’t currently on any team’s roster.

Grayson Barber ($87,750) and Tyler Freeman ($112,500) were waived by Kansas City on Feb. 14. They have since found new clubs: Barber is with the third-tier Charlotte Independence, and Freeman is with D.C. United’s reserve team in MLS Next Pro.

Joe Corona ($315,000), a former U.S. national team regular, was waived by Houston on Feb. 21, but no team claimed him. So Houston kept his contract and loaned him to Sweden’s GIF Sundsvall.

Matt Hundley ($119,000) was waived by Colorado on March 1 and doesn’t have a new club yet.

Jürgen Damm ($1,613,509) and Matías Pellegrini ($970,833) were expensive preseason buyouts by Atlanta and Miami, respectively. Pellegrini was caught in Miami’s scandal of underreporting salaries. Inter Miami bought him out last year, parked him at their former USL League One reserve team, then loaned him to Argentina’s Estudiantes last August. His loan ends next month.

Lastly, there are two players signed to next year’s expansion team, St. Louis City SC: Celio Pompeu and Max Schneider. Both players are listed on the league minimum salary ($65,500) for now.

Here are the latest versions of the charts used to show changes in key MLS salary metrics over time.