Brazilian footballer Neymar wants to leave his Spanish club Barcelona to move to France’s Paris St-Germain – but the move is set to cost a record-breaking €222m fee.
At today’s prices, one Neymar is worth £198m, or $262m, which could buy…
A plane (or three)
One Neymar could buy three Boeing 737-700 passenger planes, which cost $82.4m each.
If you wanted to upgrade to the snazzier 737-800 – the type of plane that makes up a large chunk of Ryanair’s European fleet – you’d only be able to afford two, with about $65m left over for bells and whistles.
Alternatively, you could exchange your Neymar for a private jet – ranging up to about $100m – and then spend the rest on the (insanely high) running costs every year.
- Want a luxury jet? This London shop can help
Enough spaghetti to cover Barcelona
Our colleagues over on the BBC Sport live page were crunching #NeymarMaths all day, with the help of our diligent readers. Some gems from the submissions:
- The cost of human cloning is around £1.29m. Why spend £198,000,000 on one Neymar when you could clone 153 Neymars at that price? (Thomas from York)
- One Neymar could buy enough spaghetti to cover the entire city of Barcelona (Adam Wright)
- Or 792,000,000 Freddo chocolate bars (Davo Long)
A fighter jet (or 10)
In the market for a different kind of striker?
Take your pick: an F-35 Lightning, the current darling of the US Air Force, would set you back $94m, and the (no longer available) F-22 Raptor was some $150m when it stopped production.
And for the more budget-conscious shopper, one Neymar could be traded for about 10 Russian SU-24s – a formidable strike force.
The entire payroll of the New York Yankees
Or in the US, skip the soccer, as they say, and switch to the great American pastime: baseball. You could pay for a year’s play from the whole New York Yankees main team – a bargain at just $155m for the active squad, according to player valuation database Spotrac.
And with the leftover cash, why not pay for the injured players, retained contracts, and minor squad, too? It will still only total $223m.
The winners of the other “football”
The entire New England Patriots team – Super Bowl winners, 2017 – has a payroll that is even cheaper, at $171,705,615. Bargain.
The entire GDP of six countries
If you have one Neymar, you would be able to match the entire economic output of one of six of the world’s smaller nations.
Take your pick from Tuvalu, Montserrat, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Palau – all have a GDP output ranging from about $33m to $258m, according to United Nations data from 2015.
The national debt of a small island nation
(or a teeny, tiny fraction of the US debt)
If you were feeling philanthropic, Neymar’s mammoth fee could wipe out the national debt of a small nation … like Tonga ($28.3m), Fiji ($72.4m) or Vanuatu ($82m) – or, stretching a bit, even Haiti ($234m).
Those countries, of course, just have low debt. They don’t have the highest debt-to-GDP ratios, arguably a better sign that a nation has a debt problem.
So, if you wanted to help, say, the United States with its massive debt problem, a Neymar would knock off just 0.001% of the US national debt (which is almost $20 trillion at the time of writing).
Fine, I’ll just take Neymar…
Congratulations!
If you save $1,000 a day, every day, you should be able to make your payment for one genuine Neymar in… 718 years.
Get saving.
Source: BBC