The Mind-Boggling Sums of Money Involved In a Lionel Messi Transfer
What happens when the best soccer player the world has ever seen decides he’s ready to move on from the only professional team he’s ever played for? Last week Lionel Messi informed Barcelona that he wants out. What’s followed has been a dramatic soap opera involving board room power plays, leaked private conversations, and astronomical sums of money. Here are all of the numbers behind what is likely to be the most consequential transfer in world soccer history.
Messi’s Annual Salary: Over $100,000,000
The first thing to know about soccer transfer fees and salaries is that they’re opaque. The details of most contracts are not made public, and reporting conventions—whether they are net of taxes or gross, whether bonuses are included in the value of the wages, and whether the numbers cited include image rights (more on that in a bit)—vary from country to country and sometimes newspaper to newspaper. Add in the game of telephone involved in translating technical financial details across the handful of languages that share in media coverage of Europe’s top leagues, and the incentives for soccer agents and teams to mislead journalists off the record, and the landscape can be an utter mess.
But we do have a bit more certainty about Messi’s wages than usual, thanks to Football Leaks, a massive trove of documents released to the public in 2018 by a Portugese hacker named Rui Pinto. That $100,000,000 number actually consists of two separate obligations. The first is Messi’s base salary, roughly $72,000,000 a year, and then on top of that Barcelona pays him roughly $12,000,000 for his image rights every season (unlike American sports, soccer contracts include only very limited rights for a team to use a players likeness as part of their advertising, thus teams pay players for those rights in addition to paying them to play the games).
The second obligation consists of various kinds of performance bonuses, including $14,000,000 for winning the Champions League—not, unfortunately, paid out since 2015—as well as appearance bonuses for playing in more than 60% of matches and a bonus for winning the treble (the Champions League, domestic league, and domestic cup all in the same season). There’s also a signing bonus in the neighborhood of $160,000,000. That bonus actually consists of two different bonuses: a $76,000,000 bonus for signing on the dotted line and then an additional $83,699,000 as a “loyalty bonus.”
Traditionally in soccer, bonuses like that are amortized over the course of the contract—five years in this case—meaning that Messi would likely get an additional $30,000,000 and change per year. Add that to his base salary and you get over $100,000,000 a year (not to mention a lot of confusion when comparing his salary to other luminaries, since almost a third of the money Messi brings in is from bonuses rather than wages). It’s an absolutely stratospheric number for any professional athlete and one that only a few other teams in the world could possibly match.
In soccer, Messi’s salary puts him in a class almost by himself. While reports on the specifics vary constantly—remember what we said about the murkiness of soccer finances?—and we don’t have Football Leaks-type numbers for Neymar and Ronaldo, they are likely the only players making close to Messi’s wages. The next biggest tier of earners like Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappe take home about a third of what the three megawatt stars do. By comparison, the highest-salaried NBA player in 2020, Stephen Curry, pulled down $40,200,000; in the NFL, Russell Wilson made $35,000,000; and in baseball, Mike Trout took home just under $38,000,000. The major reason for these differences is that all the American sports have collectively bargained salary caps which set the ratio of player salaries to league revenue at a fixed amount of between 48% and 50%, depending on the league. (In 2015, ESPN’s Kevin Pelton estimated LeBron’s value in a non-salary-capped NBA at $100 million per year.) Barcelona’s wage bill, on the other hand, is 83% of revenue—which is part of why they may actually want to offload Messi.
A few years of Messi, in effect, costs more than most soccer clubs in the world. On the 2019 Forbes list of most valuable soccer clubs, Newcastle United is ranked 20th, at $381,000,000. So, for your money you could have the 20th most valuable soccer team anywhere on the planet, or pay about four years of Lionel Messi’s current wages. And the incredible thing is that wages are just the beginning.
Messi’s Release Clause: $825,000,000
Unlike American sports, players aren’t simply swapped for one another in soccer. Instead, when a player changes teams, the new team pays a transfer fee in order to buy them out of their old contract and sign them to a new one. Because teams prefer to make money when they’re losing a player, transfers typically occur one to two years before the end of contracts, and almost always involve a fee, although occasionally a player will wind down his contract and become what we’d call a free agent in American sports. (The advantage for players who do this is that their new team is likely to spend some of the transfer fee savings on a higher salary for the player.)
Messi’s contract, however, is more complicated. All soccer contracts in Spain are legally obligated to have a mandatory ‘release clause’—a number that, if another team is willing to pay it, forces the team to accept. This happened to Barcelona in the summer of 2017 when Paris Saint-Germain stunned the Catalonian club with a check for $263,000,000 and Barcelona’s second best player, Neymar. Messi’s release clause is an absolutely mind-numbing $825,000,000. (That number isn’t even the biggest in La Liga. Real Madrid have a policy of ensuring that their stars never leave unless they want them to. To that end, striker Karim Benzema has a $1,194,820,000—or 1 billion euro—release clause, as did Cristiano Ronaldo before his transfer, eventually negotiated at a mere $117 million, to Juventus).
Any transfer fee paid for Messi will, however, likely be significantly lower. As a rule, most transfer fees cost less than the buy-out clause mandates, especially once a player has announced they want to leave. As long as a team offers to buy a player for more money than the team they’re currently under contract to thinks they are worth, then a deal can get done. Messi, unusually, also has the ability to opt out of his contract after every season. There is, however, some dispute over whether or not his opt out clause is applicable in the current moment.
The contract says that after each season Messi is free to leave and find a new club as long as he notifies the team by the end of June, a month after the season ends in late May. This season, thanks to the forced pandemic break, Spain’s professional league did not end until July 19th. And Barcelona were still playing matches in the Champions League, Europe’s premier international competition, all the way until August 14th, when they took an embarrassing 8-2 drubbing at the hands of Bayern Munich, which brought the Messi crisis to a head.
Messi notified Barcelona of his intention to leave on August 25—he claims that the delayed conclusion to the season pushed his deadline to a later date, and therefore he has fulfilled the obligations in his contract. Barcelona asserts that the end of June deadline still applies, and Messi missed it. La Liga has sided with Barcelona’s interpretation. Messi meanwhile has not shown up for the beginning of Barcelona’s preparations for the new season, including a medical and COVID-19 testing.
The player option to leave at the end of every season is a contractual novelty and a demonstration of Messi’s power, but standoffs like this are not uncommon in soccer. Neither Messi nor Barcelona want to spend the year locked in a court battle while the greatest player in history sits on the sideline. Given that there will likely be some transfer fee involved should Messi change teams, that means that a host of agents, businessmen and intermediaries stand to get their beaks wet to the tune of up to 10% of a transfer fee and 3% of wages as commission. Messi’s agent happens to be his father, which helps sidestep conflicts of interest (soccer agents, who have become celebrities in their own right, sometimes seem most interested in maximizing their transfer commissions), but has its own set of pitfalls: Both father and son were convicted of tax fraud in 2017, stemming from the sale of Messi’s image rights in 2007-2009.
Ultimately the question is most, likely exactly how much will Messi go for, and who will pay it?
Soccer’s Record Transfer Fee: $263,000,000 for Neymar
While nothing compares to Messi, Barcelona aren’t exactly strangers to the world of buying and selling players at astronomical prices. Neymar’s $263 million 2017 transfer to PSG was the most expensive in soccer history, and thanks to that deal, Barcelona have been involved in three of the five most expensive overall, using their Neymar money to overpay for attacker Philippe Coutinho ($160 million from Liverpool) and striker Antoine Griezmann ($120 million from Atletico Madrid). Those deals, which haven’t worked out on the pitch, are another reason why Messi wants to leave—Coutinho spent this season on loan to Bayern and is now on sale for much less than Barcelona paid, and Griezmann has had trouble fitting in.
It’s possible that despite being the best player in history, Messi won’t outdo the Neymar number by all that much, if at all. First, at 33 years old, Messi is already well past the age when most professional soccer players start slowing down. He hasn’t yet—last season he led Spain in not only goals and assists, but also all of the newfangled advanced statistics like expected goals and expected assists. But Father Time is undefeated, etc., and Messi already runs less than any other player in La Liga, which could be a problem for a team like Manchester City that depends on its forwards pressing opposition defenders aggressively. Most teams hope to get four or five peak years or a fat selling fee out of a major acquisition, but it seems unlikely that Messi can keep playing at this level for too much longer.
Rumored Messi Transfer Fee: $330,000,000
Most teams in the world simply can’t afford to pay Messi’s wages. Some, like Champions League winner Bayern Munich, won’t be interested, and others like perennial Italian champions Juventus, would be terrible fits. There’s also the fact that the pandemic has left most clubs in a financial hole. That leaves clubs like Manchester City, PSG and Inter Milan, all of whom are funded by nation states or billionaires.
City in particular have a leg up, given that they have Messi’s old coach Pep Guardiola at the helm and the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates behind them (never mind that City just managed to avoid being found guilty of violating UEFA’s Financial Fair Play rules a month ago). City’s international network of sister clubs also allows them to tack a few extra contractual years for Messi at NYCFC in Major League Soccer as he ages, a plan they are reportedly considering. The current rumored transfer fee: $330 million.
Given Messi’s stature in soccer history, it’s fitting that it might take the literal wealth of a nation state to acquire him.
Originally Appeared on GQ
