Well over a decade ago, a PDF purporting to be a photocopy of Faustino Asprilla's P60 at Newcastle went viral. The long line of noughts just about squeezed into a rectangular box foolishly designed for the real world; as your eyes loop-the-looped around his salary you became dizzy and giddy and faintly sick, like a kid on a rollercoaster for the first time. Asprilla did not start or score much on Tyneside but it did not affect his bottom line. Not really. In football it rarely does.

But there are signs that the Premier League's la-la land wage economics – a fat salary guaranteed, regardless of performance, with a little cream on top – may soon subtly shift. In January Liverpool's managing director, Ian Ayre, revealed the club's plans for lower basic salaries with higher incentives.

Now Prozone's Blake Wooster tells me that at least two teams in the top five want to introduce performance-related pay based on advanced in-game metrics. "The new wave of financial regulation means teams are adopting more intelligent ways of assessing performance and remunerating players," Wooster says. "The smarter work is focused on assessing a player's contribution to winning but one of the challenges is establishing incentives that reward the individual while recognising the team."

As things stand, performance-related pay can be as crude as suggestions from the terraces. Take goals and assists: what if a striker's goals come primarily from penalties? Or a midfielder creates half-a-dozen chances that others spurn? Rewards don't always match deeds.

Even team-based incentives – finishing in a certain league position, say – can be flawed. Last season Manchester City's players got £6.2m to split between them for winning the Premier League, paid proportionately based on appearances. Joe Hart, who played in all 38 league games, earned £446,212, a figure not to be sniffed at. But what happens when someone overperforms while his team struggle? How do we reward him?

One possible solution – for at least two top-five Premier League clubs – is to use more complex metrics than appearances, goals and clean sheets to monitor and reward each player. A full-back, for instance, might need to win a high percentage of one-on-ones and aerial duels, make a number of sprints when a team-mate has the ball in certain areas, and hit half a dozen other key performance indicators (KPIs) over a season to earn his maximum bonus.

But as Wooster points out, there are difficulties too. "Some of the most important things in football are the hardest to measure," he says. "This includes intangibles such as how players move off the ball and create space, or how players demonstrate leadership and positively influence their team-mates."

These are problems with which Valter Di Salvo, the director of football performance and science of the Qatar Football Association and its Aspire academy, has been wrestling. Di Salvo, who has worked for Lazio, Manchester United and Real Madrid, is involved in developing players and implementing performance-related pay in the Qatar Star League – based partly on player metrics.

In Qatar every home player is paid by the league, not their club, and with the World Cup 2022 in mind, Di Salvo's goal is to drive up standards. The starting point is that home-grown players' salaries are small in Qatar, so if they want more they have to earn it.

Of the maximum amount a Qatari player can earn as a bonus, 40% is based on appearances. "Are you a first-team player?" Di Salvo asks. "Are you playing regularly? Are you a national team player? If the answer to all these questions is yes, you will get the maximum."

Another 40% comes from a subjective technical assessment from their coach. "This will take in the players' skill levels and how hard they are working to improve, plus how professional they are," Di Salvo says. "Do they always attend training and charity days? Are they good for team morale? Do they fulfil all media commitments?"

The final 20% is based on physical performance. Di Salvo has drawn up a complex list of KPIs with parameters correlated to each position using GPS and Prozone data, and when a player hits them he is rewarded. Players are also fitness-tested three times a season by the league and compared with others in the same position. Those at the top of the table get a bigger bonus.

In total there are seven different categories of bonus, ensuring that the salaries for Qatari players correlate to their performances.

Could such a system work in Europe? Di Salvo insists it could, with the qualifier that care needs to be taken when drawing up KPIs.

Distance covered matters little, for instance, if you are asking a midfielder to protect the back four. There is also another fear: KPIs could be detrimental to a team's performance. If a player knows you are tracking his key passes – the ones that create scoring opportunities – they might look for the Hollywood ball every time.

Still, you can see the attraction for clubs to more performance-related pay. No one wants a Winston Bogarde on their books, picking up excessive pounds – £10m for four starts across four years at Chelsea – while piling them on. It might also improve standards. The response of most players and their agents to the proposition, of course, is just as easy to predict.