Soccer: All about money

In the costliest football transfer ever, Brazil’s young soccer star Neymar has agreed to a record-breaking five-year deal with Paris St. Germain that will cost the French club’s Qatari owners almost Rs 3,750 crores, including wages, bonuses and a 222 million euro (about Rs 1,665 crores) buyout clause. It also makes his dad Neymar Senior wealthy as he acted as facilitator. The player himself will get yearly fees of Rs 225 crores, and not have to play for Barcelona in the shadow of one of the world’s greatest footballers, Lionel Messi. The sky is the limit for the emerging generation of soccer greats like Neymar and Pogba (whose record-breaking transfer to ManU cost 105 million euros). They are reaping the most benefits from the commercial era’s record transfers.

What these astronomical inter-club transfers do for the beautiful game is, however, open to question. Millions in pay for sports stars isn’t the norm outside US pro sport. What it may do is create a super stardom that doesn’t always best serve club interests. Transfer fees reaching the sky is bad for clubs, but many seem willing to fork out bigger sums in the hope of not only winning football laurels but also the greed of pure commerce, spinning from the charisma of greats and their marketability.

What is happening, however, as Jose Mourinho notes, is that the game is heading into dangerous territory, with huge transfer fees recklessly lavished even on ordinary players. There’s a real fear that money is driving the game to absurd levels — that money itself becomes the name of the game.