You may not be remotely interested in football, but even so, it was hard to avoid the announcement last week that one club was selling a footballer to another for a sum just shy of £200 million. That's £57 million more than the GDP the Marshall Islands. With £198 million you could buy 80 Bugatti Chirons. Four Francis Bacon triptychs. A pint of milk for every person in Pakistan. Settle Roman Abramovich’s impending divorce. In other words: Paris Saint-Germain have just completed a deal that renders Neymar Jr. the world’s most expensive football player of all time.
Neymar is the Brazilian wunderkind you probably won't remember from the 2014 World Cup (he got injured in the quarter-finals) but may recall from the cover of Brazilian Voguethat summer, where he posed with Gisele Bündchen and a tastefully draped flag in a World Cup-themed issue. £198 million for a footballer is a new world record, trouncing the previous, which saw Manchester United pay £98 million for Paul Pogba.
This figure is unprecedented. According to Arsenal’s manager Arsène Wenger, the fee was “beyond calculation and beyond rationality”. Liverpool’s manager Jürgen Klopp used it as an opportunity to decry the financial fair-play rules. Ever the contrarian, Manchester United’s José Mourinho claimed: “Expensive are the ones who get into a certain level without a certain quality. For £200 million, I don’t think [Neymar] is expensive.” But even he conceded that the deal would further bloat an already inflated market: “I think he’s expensive in the fact that now you are going to have more players at 100 million pounds.”
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