Benitez’s Everton salary and contract details revealed

Everton had already made headlines when they signed Carlo Ancelotti to become manager of the Blues back in 2019 and offered him annual wages of about £10 million a year, which put him around tenth in the list of highest paid managers in the world, ironically just behind what Rafa Benitez was making at Dalian Yifang at the time.

Of that list, six of them are now unemployed or have moved to different clubs and we won’t know what their new salaries are until the season starts, but a report in the Independent seems to indicate that Benitez will be in the top five behind only Diego Simeone, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp after joining the Blues.

Additionally the three-year deal that the club announced is actually only a two-year guaranteed deal, with an option for a third year, likely performance based. This seems to be a clause the club would have put in knowing how rancorous the relationship between the fanbase and the club is likely to be, and how quickly things can go south if results or performances start turning negative.

In exchange for negotiating for a shorter contract, it has been reported the Board have made a concession to pay Benitez even more than they were paying Ancelotti - 50% more in case you were wondering. Indeed, the Independent report that Benitez will earn in the region of £15 million a year during his time at Everton.

And it’s mega-billionaire and Moshiri’s business partner Alisher Usmanov who supposedly convinced the Everton majority shareholder to sign Benitez, despite Moshiri’s doubts about hiring the former Liverpool manager.

Though, it’s also been reported by The Athletic that Benitez’s salary will, in fact, be somewhere in the region of £7 million a year.

Usmanov, despite not being directly involved with the Toffees, plays a big part in the club’s revenue stream through his conglomerate USM Holdings which is a big sponsor of the club and also owns the naming rights of the proposed new stadium on Bramley-Moore dock.

It appears this is the price of doing business with a tycoon like Usmanov, who has little room for sentiment in his portfolio. The pressure now is on Benitez to deliver on the big promises he would have had to make to the Board.