When Villarreal coach Marcelino Garcia Toral said last year that Messi, Suarez and Neymar are worth 7 or 8 times more than his club annual budget he wasn’t joking. The deadly Barca trio is by far the highest paid attack force in the history of football.
In fact, their combined net worth is so staggeringly high that it makes one’s head spin. For example, let’s say that Messi, Suarez and Neymar went to a casino and started to play blackjack. As everyone knows blackjack makes time pass quickly, but not if you are one of these three guys. If they bet $1000 every minute of every day for a whole year, and never win in the process, they would still need 700 years to spend all of their money. Truly incredible.
The trio is in the Top 10 of the highest paid footballers in the world, with Messi being a close second to Cristiano Ronaldo, and Neymar and Suarez on the 8th and 10th position respectively. This is because they receive fabulously high weekly wages: Messi is on a $396 thousand after tax, Neymar receives $317 thousand after tax and Suarez is on a wage of $295 thousand after tax.
As we already mentioned, their collective net worth is also unbelievably high and is somewhere around $370 million. Messi’s net worth is somewhere around $240 million, Neymar’s net worth is close to $90 million, and Suarez is worth ‘only’ $38 million.
In terms of where they get their incomes from, Messi’s annual salary before tax is a mind boggling $44.68 million or $20.5 million after tax. On top of this, he also earns an additional $20 to 30 million yearly from various endorsements.
Neymar signed a $120 million contract with Barcelona in 2013, which made him the highest paid player ever to have made a transfer from a club outside Europe. The deal meant that he will be paid somewhere around $15 million per year after tax in weekly wages. The young Brazilian also receives close to $16 million per year from endorsements from companies such as Konami, L’Oreal and Nike.
Suarez is the lowest paid player of the trio and has a yearly salary of a little over $15 million after tax. However, he is also the player with the highest transfer fee in history next to his name. When he changed the bleak scenery of industrial Liverpool for the sunny shores of cosmopolitan Barcelona his former club was paid a world record $108 million.
All of these numbers seem too high to the regular working man and often people say that they would like to be footballers just for a day and that then they could retire. And that’s true. If you were on Messi’s weekly salary, you can earn close to $57 thousand just for a day’s work, which would be enough for a comfortable life in any developing country.
However, people often forget that playing football at the level at which these guys are playing is an incredibly demanding profession, and it requires a lot of devotion and hard work. There have been hundreds of players who have had the talent to succeed, but haven’t followed up on that with a suitable work ethic. In fact, you don’t need to be an expert to know that skills and goals like these can only be achieved through hard work and sheer dedication. The MSN trio have earned every dollar coming their way.
