On Friday morning, Brazilian soccer player Neymar officially completed his move from Barcelona in Spain to PSG in France.
The transfer fee smashed previous records and was a deal unlike any done before, with the 25-year-old's fee reportedly $333 million (โฌ222 million).
Now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with the AFL, but it's quite interesting to break down the numbers compared to the AFL's top players (and the entire league itself).
Before we begin, we know there's no where near as much money in Aussie Rules compared to the world game, but to be honest it's just fun to compare.
Firstly, let's take the transfer fee as a whole. $333 million. When you balance that up with anything related to the AFL... well let's just say the League wouldn't know what to do with that much cash.
So let's break this down.
The average wage in the AFL currently stands at $371,000 a season (not including rookies), but for the sake of this exercise, let's suggest all 44 players on each AFL list (including rookies) get paid the average wage.
That means, all 792 players across the league earn $371,000 per season.
If you add together every player's yearly wage, it adds up to $293.8 million. That's $40 million LESS than Neymar's transfer fee.
Neymar's fee could cover an entire season's wages, and there would still be $40 million left over. Amazing.
To break this down even further, Neymar's reported wages would be close toย โฌ550,000 per week, which equates to $821,000.
That's on a weekly basis.
In the AFL, only six players will earn over $1 million in 2017, while 18 players will earn between $700,000-$800,000.
With those numbers made public, we can only assume around 15-20 players will earn between $800,000-$1 million this season.
That's a total of 20-25 players who will make over $800,000 in 2017, compared to Neymar, who makes $821,000 in a week.
Within just 14 days, the Brazilian will already earn nearly $500,000 more than the highest-paid Australian footballer makes in one season.
Those are some mind-blowing numbers.
