Best sporting teams that worked on a budget

Southampton's Sadio Mane celebrates scoring a hat-trick. Photo / AP

Some sports clubs try to buy their way to success, like French football champions Paris Saint-Germain whose salaries are the highest in world sport if a survey released this month is to be believed.

The Sporting Intelligence website put the PSG players' average salary at about $11.2m, although the club claimed the figures were wrong and they weren't even in the top five.

Bargain is a comparative word in professional sports, but there are teams who have succeeded with clever budgeting, either by choice or not.

San Antonio Spurs (basketball)
Maybe the most brilliant budget managers in professional sport. The current champs have won five titles since 1999, making them the most successful club alongside the Los Angeles Lakers in that period. But their spending is always way down the list - for instance they won the title in 2005 when their payroll came in 20th. Clever decision making upon clever decision making is their winning formula, helped by star players such as Tim Duncan with strong team ethics who accept lesser contracts. One writer described their knack with free agents as a mixture of salesmanship, coercion and magic.

Southampton (football)
English Premier League lightweights have next to no hope of hanging on to their best players, and Southampton lost $180m worth of stars like Luke Shaw and Adam Lallana for the nearly completed 2014/15 season. They spent "just" $110m of that on replacements and still managed to mix it with the big boys near enough to the top of the table.

Tampa Bay Rays (baseball)
The Rays can't compete money-wise with the big guns. They've done very nicely however thanks to a policy of buying players who have done well in the past but were on the slide. This got them into the playoffs four times from 2008 to 2013. They were American League champs in 2008, despite their payroll ranking 29th among the 30 major league teams. The Rays went into the season with a $58m payroll - the lowest ever comparison-wise for a team making the World Series. The class leading Yankees' was $287m.

Blackburn Rovers (football)
Their 1994/95 EPL title win marked the end of romance for English football. Yes, owner Jack Walker's money did the trick, but it was by no means a bought title although there were a couple of major signings including that of Alan Shearer. Camaraderie and the aura of manager Kenny Dalglish were central to bringing the EPL title to such an unfancied club. The likes of Blackburn have no chance of breaking the stranglehold which is now exerted by the really big spenders.