Ronaldo, Salah, Kane: Comparing the Premier League's highest-paid XI to the best XI overall

The Premier League has drawn the curtains on another heavy month of spending.

While Manchester United and Arsenal might have kept their wallets firmly shut, the likes of Everton, Aston Villa and Newcastle United loosened their pursestrings for the January transfer window.

As such, there are plenty of exciting new faces to welcome into one of sport's most lucrative competitions as we look ahead to see how the 2021/22 season will conclude in the coming months.

However, two things that haven't changed at all over the course of the January spending have been the configurations of the Premier League's best XI as well as its highest-paid line-up.

As you'll be well aware, there's not a 1:1 correlation of wages to quality in the beautiful game, so the highest-earning player isn't necessarily the best footballer in the world and so on.

In fact, when we came to compare the top-earning XI in the Premier League to what your humble writer considers to be the best XI, period, there were actually very few similarities at all.

Cristiano Ronaldo, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Kevin De Bruyne were anomalous in proving not only the finest players in their positions, but also the ones bagging the most money for their troubles.

So, how did we reach our comparison? Well, the highest-earning XI was compiled using spotrac data and the finest Premier League line-up ultimately came down to a matter of opinion.

However, it is worth bearing in mind that the best XI is based upon overall quality in recent years as opposed to simply current form in order to scale back on recency bias and reactionary picks.

Got it? Right then, well, let's see just how different the Premier League's best and highest-paid XIs really are by checking out how they line up