Could Barca agree a deal at, say, $200 million to $250 million?
Like I said, given the current circumstances
and the current personnel at the club it's highly unlikely. But even if they were willing to, who could pay that amount?
Messi's contract is worth around $47 million a season. Assuming he's not going to take a pay cut and would want a modest bump, you'd assume he'd expect at least $50 million a year. Imagine a five-year deal, chuck in amortization on the fee and you're looking at $90 million to $100 million on a single player.
True, football clubs make a lot of money, but that's an absurd amount. It represents more than 25 percent of the revenue of all but seven of the clubs on Deloitte's 2014 Football Money League list.
And, of those seven clubs, we can take out Barcelona (for obvious reasons) and Real Madrid (for equally obvious ones). That leaves five. Two of them, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City, fell foul of financial fair play last year and are under transfer restrictions. It's simply unworkable for either club, unless they decide to sell most of the assets they have to make room for Messi. Chelsea are most likely in the same boat, given that they've only had one season of profitability of late.
That leaves Bayern and Manchester United from the list. They're profitable (though, for United, it remains to be seen just how profitable, given this summer's spending spree and no Champions League football) and they have high turnovers (or gross revenues) that seem to keep growing year on year.
Messi reunited with Pep! Leo in Cristiano's old stomping grounds! What a story that would be!
Yeah, except this is the theoretical limit of what is possible. For two clubs that have been run extremely prudently -- thanks to the Glazers in Manchester and the two decades-plus of profitability in Munich -- to devote more than 10 percent of their annual revenue to a single guy would be extraordinary. And that's where you get into issues of return on investment -- Messi turns 28 this summer -- and how much additional revenue he'd actually bring in.
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