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A Quarter Billion Euros Was The Number
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“These guys are bats**t crazy.” That was my reaction. “L’argent bête,” or stupid money in English, was how my friend and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) supporter Sylvestre called it, “When you have so much money you can afford to be stupid,” he concluded. He said that in much more colorful language, but that’s not the point of this article.

Unless you live under a rock, you should have seen / heard the news: Brazilian international forward Neymar Jr., has left F.C. Barcelona to sign with PSG for a record transfer fee of 222 million Euros. That’s 262 million US dollars, 330 million Canadian dollars.

Let me throw some more dizzying numbers at you, because you need to realize what’s really at play. These numbers were taken from international news channel France 24: The transfer fee itself costs €222million. His signing bonus is €80 million. The taxes (of course) on the transfer is €100 million. That’s a total of €402 million, and if you add his gross salary over the next five years he signed for, it totals up to €712 million. That’s almost a billion Euros for a player.

Screenshot grabbed from France 24, explaining the numbers in play.

It’s the number €222 million that has people riled up, and for good reason. When you play the comparison game, it really puts a lot of things into perspective. The owners of PSG are Qataris who are well implanted in their country’s institutions. A reporter on France 24 said this: “Qatar is a small country, with a small population, but with the world largest natural gas reserve. They can thus afford to buy whatever makes them happy, and they decided Neymar was exactly that.” You can’t get a better, simpler explanation than that.

Is Neymar worth it? If you ask me, yes he is. First of all, it’s not his fault that the football transfer market is increasingly going insane with its spending prices. He didn’t to be demand to command that much money, because all he wants to do is play football and be happy with his family, like he said.

Let me be objective about the fact that he’s leaving a club I’m not a fan of, for a club I absolutely despise. The dude is a marketing phenomenon: a few hours after his new flocked jersey was made available at the club’s official store (priced at a whooping €140 mind you), it had already sold out. By the time he was introduced to the crowd at the Parc des Princes (PSG’s stadium), the club had already made a million Euros off his jersey sales alone. There’s a reason why this guy was ranked ahead of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, as the world’s most marketable athlete.

His star power is undeniable. With him now spearheading PSG’s attack, he’s going to single-handedly elevate the club’s popularity, to heights I don’t think Zlatan Ibrahimovic ever did, no disrespect to him.

Neymar says he did move to Paris for the money, and I believe him on this as well. Money in this case was just like the cherry on the cake. He left because he wanted to write his own legacy, and that’s something I completely understand and agree with. He’s 25 years old, he’s proved he can carry a team (Santos FC, Brazil), and win while doing it.

Unfortunately for him, to cement his legacy as a superstar legend, he couldn’t do it while playing for F.C. Barcelona. That’s Messi’s team until he retires, and his aura and shadow are too big to eclipse. If Neymar played well and Barcelona shined, that automatically meant that Messi shined too, by the default of being his teammate. All praise went to the Argentine genius. Not to mention, Neymar didn’t play particularly well last season, scoring thirteen goals in thirty league games. He took a backseat to Luis Suarez and Messi, and when you’re a bona fide superstar in your own right, and you’re young and in your prime, and you’ve proved that you can win, taking a backseat to anyone is not an option.

Neymar is in a similar situation to Kyrie Irving, the point guard showstopper for the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA. Kyrie Irving plays with LeBron James, the best player in the league. However for a few weeks now, it’s become public knowledge that Kyrie wants to leave Cleveland. The reasons given are that he’s tired of being in LeBron’s shadow, and he’s also fed up with LeBron getting preferential treatment over everyone. Kyrie and Neymar are both 25, they are both great players in their respective disciplines, and they had / have teammates who are considered better than them. So they want to establish their own greatness, even if it’s at the risk of leaving, being heavily criticized, and potentially not even being successful. You have the right to find out how far you can exploit your potential. The only difference between Kyrie and Neymar, is that Neymar has shown he can carry a team and win, and Kyrie has yet to prove that.

Neymar has now positioned himself to be the best player in the world. To achieve that he has to do three things: Score at least thirty goals during the season, win the champions league with his new team, and beat either Real Madrid or Barcelona if not both, on the way to wining it. This also being a world cup season, how he performs with Brazil will be vita in his hopes for individual supremacy.

I respect his choice and the pressure he put on himself. He has that unrelenting desire to be his own man, Kyrie Irving too, and it’s maddening to see people, who don’t know what it takes to be great, just sit down and dismiss their efforts in a few words. They say that both guys will never be as great as their bigger counterparts, or that they should forego personal ambition, for team success in the shadow of someone else, because they will win anything if they leave. Who are you to talk? How do you know that for sure?

PSG made a powerful money move that has THE F.C. Barcelona looking like an ordinary club…I didn’t necesarily want to add to fuel to all this Neymar noise, but it was too good to pass up. This is going to be a great football season! Believe that.

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