this
joke player

Everything will still end up paying for his wages.

Article copied and pasted:

But surely big clubs sell so many shirts that all the money adds up, right? Well, in this article about Paris Saint-Germain, we can see that Manchester United and Real Madrid sell the most shirts: 1.2-1.5 million a year. That info comes form a study by Dr Peter Rohlmann, who also has figures for other top clubs available here (EDIT: full article). In comparison, Chelsea sells 700-900 thousand shirts a year. These figures are averages of total sales from 2005 to 2009, so they may be slightly inaccurate today, but that's all we have to work with.

So what does this mean in terms of club revenue? Using the higher number in the range to calculate, that means Madrid makes 18 million euros a year from shirt sales. One might be thinking that's not bad at all - that money lets Chelsea buy both Gary Cahill and Marko Marin, or one Nicolas Anelka, or Romelu Lukaku with his add-ons. For simplicity** let's even assume Chelsea is as "popular" [read: profitable] today as Madrid was in the 05-09 period. So 18 million euros a year. But that's all shirt sales. We have to find how much money individual players bring in.

[** 18 million is more convenient for the subsequent calculations, a more accurate range for Chelsea would be 8.4-10.8 million]

How much is any one player worth? Well, on average, each player in an 18-man (what a nice round number) squad sells 83,333 shirts each year, earning the club 1 million euros annually. Obviously, some players are more popular than others - Didier Drogba would have sold more shirts than Yuri Zhirkov, for example - but that's why we use averages. What that means is no player at Chelsea sells enough shirts to offset their wages, which are all higher than 20,000 euros a week (which equates to about 1 million a year).

But what about a really popular player, you ask? Cristiano Ronaldo was apparently reported to have sold 1.2 million shirts in Madrid alone. Well, it's the Metro, and there are no quotes form any Madrid representative in the article, and it is suspiciously close to the total figures reported by Adidas above, so I don't really trust this report at all. But let's play with these numbers anyway:

Since the shirts only make 12 euros profit, that's 14.4 million euros in that year. Assuming steady sales over the life of a five year contract, that's 72 million euros. Hey, that almost pays off! But wait, big players earn big money - what is Cristiano Ronaldo's salary? Forbes lists his wages at 20 million US dollars, or 16.3 million euros, a year. So all the money Madrid make from Ronaldo shirts is used... to pay Ronaldo.

So then say Chelsea pays 40 million euros for Neymar, and matches his salary to that of David Luiz - somewhere near 30,000 pounds, or 38,000 euros, a week - around 1.5 million euros a year. To break even, Neymar would have to sell around 750,000 shirts each year of a five year contract, all while other players each sell over 83,000. That seems highly unlikely.

This post was edited by chelsea11 on Jul 3 2015 06:37pm

Nani to fener. Trying to get rvp too but will be hard and already got 3 strikers..

We bought around 5-6 players already this year since its allowed to have 14 players from other countries now.

I dont like nani so much but vs 6mio its not that bad

This post was edited by Hore_to_the_t on Jul 3 2015 06:43pm

damn.. nanu is da king but yes, for that amount of $$$ then it's a great deal for fener

Not entirely accurate.

I have said it repeatedly, when a club signs a well-known player, there is more to it than simply shirt sales.

The team profile improves, the media attention raises awareness which brings fans, which bring $$$ through different channels, the brand value of the club improves (city, psg), new sponsorships are being signed etc.

Take my boy Neymoore for instance. Regardless of what Barca paid for him 50 or 100 mios and what they are paying him (reportedly ~ 12m a year) he is a good deal.

If Leon signed for Tottenham tomorrow, do you actually think shirt sales would be the benefit alone ?

Demba ba to china for 15mio or so

Podolski to gala

This post was edited by Hore_to_the_t on Jul 4 2015 03:24am

Why would anyone want a kit of a loanee?