Lionel Messi | Joins Inter Miami (pg4111)

[mrbelfry]

Getting just a tiny weeny bit ahead of ourselves I think. We haven't even signed Bony yet.

This thread is giving me a teeny weeny bony

 

[Craggers]

That article is horrible, utterly horrible. Guy is supposed to be a football finance expert yet doesn't seem to know the difference between structuring payments and amortisation. Also no discussion of the potential revenue boost from signing someone like Messi. Let's hope he's been horribly misquoted as that level of stupidity from someone who's regularly quoted in the media is inexcusable.

I think though the Messi effect is still overstated. We are saying that Messi will repay his transfer himself in revenue but this is near on impossible over the length of his contract. Here is an example, according to figures between 2009-2014, Real Madrid sold on average 1.5M shirts a year, that is £105M a year at our shirt prices. The latest figures I can find on us is we sold on average in 2012, 250,000. Extrapolate that figure a little, call it 400,000 for 2014. Now is Messi really going to bring in 1.1M extra shirt sales to be comparable to Real Madrid, I highly doubt it, plus I'm sure Nike gets a cut of that figure anyway as they make the shirts. I'm afraid it is simply impossible to make enough money to 'repay' his transfer over any contract length, yes there would be a boost but it would seriously effect the way in which the club is growing without even thinking of passing FFP. Imagine us being hit with a £150M debt, it would set us back years of what has been so far, amazing progress.

Again our revenue last year totaled £346M, that includes sponsorship, shirt sales, everything. Now Messi is going to cost us lets face it at least £140/150M, probably more, and then we have to factor in he would have to be on pretty much the biggest wage in the world. That is almost 50% of turnover on a single player. Yes it will not all be paid at once and for purposes of FFP, we might get away with it but at what cost would this be to the rest of the team? This transfer would prevent us sustaining reinforcing our existing squad for quite sometime and I don't know about you but we are slowly but surely getting to the point where several key players are going to be past their prime. On football, Messi is also unproven in this league and we just do not know if he would turn up here and set the league on fire, to be honest he would have no choice but to do so, again the risk is there.

I'm afraid anyone thinking this transfer could happen is not thinking but is dreaming. The only clubs that can afford Messi are the ones that have huge spending power through their massive turnovers, a club like that could simply make way for the wages and use the actual cash they have made to make the buy. A perfect example is Real Madrid who historically can sign big because they have the massive cash flow to enable it. We unfortunately just do not make enough money to pay for it without the Sheikh having to step in which would almost certainly attract the attention of UEFA.

Barcelona remember too are also in a very good bargaining position, they do not want to sell him so they will strip us for every pound they can make should it happen. It would not surprise me if this transfer meant losing Silva or someone else in the future as well seeing as they can't sign anyone to replace Messi. That means this deal will not be cheap, it will be extremely expensive and at the end of the day would it be worth it? Neymar was a similar large deal going to Barcelona and it cost the president his job and also Barcelona's chance to really spend on reinforcing their squad. They are now in tatters, not thanks to that deal but because they failed to manage their resources effectively for the good of an aging, spent team.

I ask, why do we need Lionel Messi. We have a decent enough squad right now and £150M (if it were available) would be far better spent elsewhere on a group of top quality players in several positions where they are needed. Messi coming here would make shockwaves, no doubt but to what consequence to our incredible financial progress and also to the football?

Anyway, we have just paid £30M for Bony, we will not be signing Messi anytime soon nor anytime in the future and certainly not whilst the accountants are in charge.

Pretty much how I see it. I don't understand how people think that the messi deal would pay for itself. Unless we get a dodgy sponsorship deal with mansours taxi services ltd, we have no chance of signing messi. That's my opinion, but it is nice to dream.

Don't forget sponsorship deals with our partners for our £200m CFA are yet to be announced.

This could very well be the Mansours taxi services ltd you refer too!

 

[Craggers]

Yup and a £204million release clause in his current deal.

that's for teams in spain though I believe Prestwich blue stated. ie probably just to halt real Madrid.

And now us. We are hardly Barcelona's favourite second club either.

Isn't the release clause different for Spanish teams compared to teams outside of Spain?

I thought his release clause for a non-Spanish team was something like £120m.

 

[richards30]

that's for teams in spain though I believe Prestwich blue stated. ie probably just to halt real Madrid.

And now us. We are hardly Barcelona's favourite second club either.

Isn't the release clause different for Spanish teams compared to teams outside of Spain?

I thought his release clause for a non-Spanish team was something like £120m.

yeah am sure both tolm and Prestwich blue said that mate.

 

[BluessinceHydeRoad]

It is impossible to know what the future holds for Messi and Barcelona, but it does seem that he just might leave the club. Relations seem to have become incresingly tense over the last few years, until Barcelona appear to have to replace the entire managerial staff to placate him now, and then there is no guarantee that this will succeed. The lesser of two evils may be to bid him farewell.

There is evidence that City have been monitoring Messi's position at Barcelona for at least two years and are serious in their intention to bring him to Manchester. In my opinion, if Messi leaves Spain he will come to City. It has nothing to do with FFP, which will be irrelevant and City will not have to sell the squad or the Sheikh's star racing camel or anything else to buy him.

Firstly, Messi will be going nowhere in January. If he moves it will be in summer. Real would be a competitor, perhaps, but no-one else. United could not even think of competing. City's owner, and many of his advisors, are businessmen for whom this deal would be small scale after deals worth $65 billion for the development of Dubai or even £4 billion to save Barclays. City will not even pay the transfer fee or the bulk of the wages. The link up of Messi with the Sheikh and Manchester City would be irresistible to many commercial interests. Messi would get a salary and bonuses from the club, but contracts with all kinds of football products etc etc would mean that he earned mouth watering sums, even for him. This is the kind of world the Sheikh moves in and no other club or owner, even the Qataris or Abramovitch, does. If City want Messi and can get him, a deal will be put in place.

 

[BillyShears]

Imagine the meltdown if FFP stops City and Chelsea from buying him but United stroll along and get him - because they could finance the deal with their revenue streams without a sweat. It'd expose FFP for what it really is but there would be nothing to be done about it.

There is, IMO, something to be done. Sign him to City and go to court over FFP.

Or like you say, just add a raft of new sponsorships, renegotiate existing deals. But as I say for me if there's a willingness from Messi's part to come, the deal will get done. FFP will be an extremely secondary consideration if it is one at all.

 

[blueparrot]

It is impossible to know what the future holds for Messi and Barcelona, but it does seem that he just might leave the club. Relations seem to have become incresingly tense over the last few years, until Barcelona appear to have to replace the entire managerial staff to placate him now, and then there is no guarantee that this will succeed. The lesser of two evils may be to bid him farewell.

There is evidence that City have been monitoring Messi's position at Barcelona for at least two years and are serious in their intention to bring him to Manchester. In my opinion, if Messi leaves Spain he will come to City. It has nothing to do with FFP, which will be irrelevant and City will not have to sell the squad or the Sheikh's star racing camel or anything else to buy him.

Firstly, Messi will be going nowhere in January. If he moves it will be in summer. Real would be a competitor, perhaps, but no-one else. United could not even think of competing. City's owner, and many of his advisors, are businessmen for whom this deal would be small scale after deals worth $65 billion for the development of Dubai or even £4 billion to save Barclays. City will not even pay the transfer fee or the bulk of the wages. The link up of Messi with the Sheikh and Manchester City would be irresistible to many commercial interests. Messi would get a salary and bonuses from the club, but contracts with all kinds of football products etc etc would mean that he earned mouth watering sums, even for him. This is the kind of world the Sheikh moves in and no other club or owner, even the Qataris or Abramovitch, does. If City want Messi and can get him, a deal will be put in place.

Agree with all that, but doesn't the whole transfer fee have to be paid by the club to register him without 3rd party ownership. Not saying it couldn't be recouped through sponsorship, but we would have to pay the fee.

 

[LevyBee76]

A new article by GABRIELE MARCOTTI

http://www.espnfc.com/spanish-prime...arcelona-for-another-league-gabriele-marcotti

It's January, he's one of the greatest players in history, he's the man of the moment. So we might as well speculate about this: what would it take for Lionel Messi to leave Barcelona?

Before we do, though, let's state this very clearly. It's extremely unlikely that Lionel Messi will move in the foreseeable future, and not just for financial reasons.

First and foremost, we have no indication that he wants to move. We just have reports of tension with his manager Luis Enrique and with the Spanish media over the investigation into his tax affairs.

We also have no indication that Barca want to sell him.

Nobody, least of all embattled club president Josep Maria Bartomeu, wants to be remembered as the guy who sold Barcelona's greatest-ever player at the age of 27. And right now, Bartomeu is getting it from all sides. Former presidents such as Joan Laporta are turning the screws on him in public (maybe because they want to run again?). His opponents note that he was never actually elected president by the members, but took over because he was vice president when Sandro Rosell was forced to step down following the Neymar case.

You could even question whether he has the mandate to make such a decision, which is why more than a few are calling for new elections.

The same applies, to some degree, to Luis Enrique. Should he chose to force the issue -- and, again, let's be clear, there is no indication that he would do this -- and turn it into a "him or me" situation, it's a nonstarter. It's like taking an ice cream cone to a knife fight. Not even something worth contemplating.

Maybe if there was a powerful and courageous director of football at the club with a clear vision of how they might be better off with a more traditional attack of Neymar and Luis Suarez and a clear notion of how the funds raised from a sale could be reinvested, then maybe it could have some impetus. But, of course, Barcelona don't even have a director of football right now after Andoni Zubizarreta was shown the door. And directors of football tend not to be that powerful, especially at clubs like Barca.

Even if there was some persuasive, risk-taking figure who thought it genuinely was a good idea to ditch Messi, there would be another problem, one well beyond Barcelona's control: the transfer ban.

The club can't sign any players during this window or the next one.That's it. See these 25 guys? Throw in the kids (all but four of whom are 20 or younger) from Barcelona B, currently battling to avoid the drop to the third flight, plus players out on loan -- Ibrahim Afellay, Gerard Deulofeu, Cristian Tello, Denis Suarez and Alex Song -- and that's it. That's all Barcelona can rely on to strengthen their squad.

That doesn't exactly give you much wiggle room, does it?

And most of all, it means that whatever you get from the Messi deal can't be reinvested until 12 months from now. Which pretty much guarantees (unless you really, really, really believe in that whole "addition by subtraction" thing) that you'll be worse off until 2016. Oh, and by the way, when you are able to wade into the transfer market again a year from now everyone will know that the huge wad of Messi cash will be burning a hole in your pocket and they'll be able to hold you to ransom, making bargains hard to come by.

OK, but what about Messi's release clause? It's 250 million euros ($295 million).

Again, it would only come into play if Messi were determined to leave, and we have zero indication that this is the case now or that it will be in the foreseeable future. But that's the only way he moves unless Barcelona are willing to do a deal.

Here it gets fiendishly complicated, as we saw when Javi Martinez moved from Athletic Bilbao to Bayern Munich since, technically, it's the player who buys himself out. But Messi, rich as he might be, doesn't have $295 million to buy his freedom. So the buying club would need to provide those funds. Except if they simply write Messi a check for $295 million and tell him: "Go give it to Barca and get yourself released," then the Spanish taxman (who already isn't on the Messi family's Christmas card list) might consider that $295 million as income. And if it's income, he'd want his piece of the action, because that's what the taxman does.


At that stage, you could chuck another $200 million into the mix. In the Martinez deal, Bayern and Bilbao eventually avoided the situation by agreeing a fee that was marginally lower than the release clause, but only after spending a fortune on lawyers and tax advisors.

Could Barca agree a deal at, say, $200 million to $250 million?

Like I said, given the current circumstances and the current personnel at the club it's highly unlikely. But even if they were willing to, who could pay that amount?

Messi's contract is worth around $47 million a season. Assuming he's not going to take a pay cut and would want a modest bump, you'd assume he'd expect at least $50 million a year. Imagine a five-year deal, chuck in amortization on the fee and you're looking at $90 million to $100 million on a single player.

True, football clubs make a lot of money, but that's an absurd amount. It represents more than 25 percent of the revenue of all but seven of the clubs on Deloitte's 2014 Football Money League list.

And, of those seven clubs, we can take out Barcelona (for obvious reasons) and Real Madrid (for equally obvious ones). That leaves five. Two of them, Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City, fell foul of financial fair play last year and are under transfer restrictions. It's simply unworkable for either club, unless they decide to sell most of the assets they have to make room for Messi. Chelsea are most likely in the same boat, given that they've only had one season of profitability of late.

That leaves Bayern and Manchester United from the list. They're profitable (though, for United, it remains to be seen just how profitable, given this summer's spending spree and no Champions League football) and they have high turnovers (or gross revenues) that seem to keep growing year on year.

Messi reunited with Pep! Leo in Cristiano's old stomping grounds! What a story that would be!

Yeah, except this is the theoretical limit of what is possible. For two clubs that have been run extremely prudently -- thanks to the Glazers in Manchester and the two decades-plus of profitability in Munich -- to devote more than 10 percent of their annual revenue to a single guy would be extraordinary. And that's where you get into issues of return on investment -- Messi turns 28 this summer -- and how much additional revenue he'd actually bring in.

Plus, they'd still need to have a fire sale of at least part of their squad. Given the number of high earners on their books, what we know about motivated sellers and the fact that few clubs can even afford their players, it would be far from straightforward.

And that's before we even get into the footballing side of things. Sure, he'd make any team better. But by how much?

All of this is to point out just how difficult and improbable it is that Messi will leave Barcelona any time soon. True, we never believed Luis Figo would leave either -- and to Madrid, no less! -- but that was a different era.

For better or worse, Messi and Barca are stuck together for the foreseeable future. Like any marriage, it has ups and downs. And, like some marriages, there are financial considerations that keep them together.

 

[johnmc]

That article is suggesting Messi is on around £35m (if he is talking US $) which is nearly £700k a week??

 

[pudge]

Some still refuse to accept the rise of our great club and are stuck in ikkle ciddy mode.

All roads point to us, if he does get moved on i might add.

It's got nothing to do with believing Messi wouldn't want to come to little ol' City.

More to do with believing he'll never leave Barca.