Mbappé to Real Madrid is the snip of the century after a Messi cautionary tale

Break down the deal for the French superstar and set it against others at the top of the market, and it's clear Madrid got their man at the right price

A quick question to start, and try not to cheat, and stop reading at the end of the next sentence if you’re serious about trying to get it right.

How many of the dozen most expensive footballers of all time, in terms of transfer fees, have been signed by Real Madrid?

Look away now if you’re trying to guess.

The answer, perhaps counter-intuitively, is none.

Paris Saint-Germain have signed the two costliest footballers to date in Neymar (€222m) and Kylian Mbappé (€180m), then Barcelona's acquisition of Philippe Coutino (€145m) is in third place followed by Atletico Madrid’s capture of João Félix (€126m) in fourth, Chelsea’s purchase of Enzo Fernández (€121m) in fifth and Atletico’s purchase of Antoine Griezmann (€120m) in sixth.

Manchester City, Arsenal and Chelsea respectively paid £100m each for Jack Grealish (€117m) Declan Rice (€117m) and Moisés Caicedo (€117m) to register as joint-seventh biggest signings ahead of Romelu Lukaku (€115m to Chelsea) in 10th, then Paul Pogba (€105m to Manchester United) and Ousmane Dembélé (€105m to Barca) in joint 11th.

That’s not to say Real Madrid haven’t spent a lot of money on buying and paying players down the years. They have four of the 30 most expensive signings ever (to date) in Jude Bellingham (13th most expensive at €103m), Gareth Bale and Eden Hazard (joint 14th most expensive at €100m), and Cristiano Ronaldo (19th most expensive at €94m).

And of course, 24 years ago, they embarked on a lavish, record-setting spree to assemble Los Galácticos, signing Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, the original Ronaldo and David Beckham in successive summers from 2000 to 2003.

But they have not been as preeminent in recent times as you might imagine for a club that last month returned to the No.1 position in global football in money terms, using revenues for the 2022-23 season. This is from Deloitte’s annual ‘Football Money League’, published last month (figures in Euros).

And now they’ve signed Mbappé, for zero transfer fee and relatively modest wages, by superstar standards. Marca in Spain reported last week that the Frenchman, 25, has already signed his Real contract, literally, as he would be entitled to do as a free agent this summer. Other sources say he will only finalise all the paperwork once it is clear PSG won’t meet Real Madrid in this season’s Champions League, or after they have done so.

Not that it matters; it’s clear Mbappé is finally moving to Madrid, and will do so as unarguably one of the best, most popular and most valuable players in the world at the moment, alongside Jude Bellingham, Vinicius Junior and Erling Haaland, the first two of which are already at Real.

At 25, Mbappé has won the World Cup once (in 2018), has also finished as a runner-up (in 2022, when he became only the second man to score a hat-trick in a World Cup final, following Geoff Hurst in 1966), has won six French league titles, first with Monaco then five times with PSG, with a sixth to follow soon. He’s also won multiple domestic cups and has a 2020 runners-up medal in the Champions League, a tournament where he has been setting all manner of scoring records.

Thus Real Madrid’s acquisition of the player for zero transfer fee is a huge coup that has saved them, arguably, €250m-plus if you consider what his ‘market rate’ would be if he were under contract at another major club.

In 2020, when he was 21 and with three years remaining on his PSG contract, he was worth, according to the CIES Football Observatory at the time, €265.2m. I doubt anyone can make a cogent case he is a less valuable player today.

As for Mbappé’s wages at Real Madrid, he will be taking a huge cut in headline salary, having been on a package worth around €200m per year in Paris. 

At Madrid, he will earn a basic €15m per year, for five years, after tax. He will also receive a signing-on fee of €150m spread across five years, effectively pushing his annual salary up to €45m per year, before bonuses. 

Mbappé has also negotiated to keep 80% of his image rights income, or in other words 80% of any new commercial deals Real Madrid sign involving him specifically.

It is expected the club will be able earn approaching €30m per year from such deals, maybe more, giving Mbappé an extra €24m a year.

Image rights at Real Madrid have traditionally been split 50-50 between the club and star players, right back to the Galacticos era, but with Mbappé’s basic salary so low at ‘only’ €15m a year after tax, Madrid needed to sugar his deal in several ways.

In addition to the €15m basic salary, the €30m annualised signing bonus, plus the €24m in estimated rights income, Mbappé will continue to make north of €20m in personal endorsement income from Nike, Hublot and Oakley, among other clients.

In a good season, with bonuses, Madrid’s new No.10 should be clearing €100m from his activities on and off the field.

He, and the club, will be able to cash in because he is among the most popular athletes, currently active and retired, in the world, across all sports.

We shouldn’t worry that Mbappé will be short of a few quid, then, nor short of opportunities to win the biggest club trophies in the game.

Real Madrid are almost certainly going to do well from the deal, on and off the pitch.

Their outlay on Mbappé over five years will be €283.8m: the €150m signing-on fee, plus five years of pre-tax wages at €26,765,318 per year, or €133.8m (I asked a Spanish tax expert what sum Real Madrid would need to pay Mbappé to leave him with €15m after tax, basic, per year).

That €283.8m over five years equates to €56.76m (or about £47m) per year cost to Madrid.

So where does this sit compared to what other global stars of football are costing their clubs? 

Over in Saudi Arabia, Cristiano Ronaldo’s deal including various commercial elements is worth around £170m a year for two years, as is Karim Benzema’s at Al-Ittihad, while Neymar is on a reported £138m per year at Al Hilal.

Those three players are respectively aged 39, 36 and 32. By comparison, £47m for Prime Mbappé is a snip.

Meanwhile at Manchester City, Erling Haaland, age 23, is reported to be on a basic salary of around £400,000 per week, or £20.8m a year, but “a series of substantial, almost-guaranteed bonuses” reportedly takes that up to £865,000 per week, or £44.98m per year.

Haaland also has a favourable image rights arrangement and a raft of personal sponsors.

Again, Mbappé doesn’t look expensive for Real set against this.

And then there’s Lionel Messi, who has basic pay of $12m a year with Inter Miami, but guaranteed bonus and appearance money take this up to $20,446,667 (just over £16m) per year. We can be precise to the nearest dollar on that MLS pay because MLS’s player union has always published every players’ salary to the last cent on their brilliant Salary Guide page.

Messi, 36, also takes a cut of subscriptions sold by AppleTV+ to live MLS games around the world since he moved last year. That’s reportedly as much as 50%, of around 1m new subscriptions at $99 a year each since he joined. Or, about $50m.

He also earns tens of millions in personal endorsements per year, and his Inter Miami and MLS deal gives him an option to own a share of an MLS franchise in the future, which could become worth hundreds of millions more.

Again, his package make’s Madrid’s deal for Mbappé look like a steal.

Real Madrid won’t struggle to pay him, as even La Liga’s president Javier Tebas agrees. Tebas has been at loggerheads with Madrid’s president Florentino Perez for years, not least over the club’s role in Super League breakaway plans

But he said of Mbappé’s summer move: “Of course, this is fantastic news for Real Madrid and for Spanish football. He is one of the top players in the world. In my opinion, Bellingham, Haaland, and Mbappe are the three dominant players on the planet, and two of them are now at Real Madrid.

“Real Madrid is a club in an excellent economic position. The president and the general manager are very capable administrators.”

There was a cautionary tale about a club over-stretching themselves with a superstar’s salary in 2021, when El Mundo in Spain splashed on a story about the cost of Lionel Messi in his final  contract with Barcelona between November 2017 and June 2021. 

The newspaper - which published extracts from the contract - revealed that Messi would receive a maximum of €555,237,619 (or $674m at contemporary exchange rates, or £476m) over less than four seasons. 

The El Mundo exclusive said Barca were paying €138m per season, including a signing bonus of €115m and and a loyalty bonus of €78m. The paper said Messi had already banked €512m under the contract with five months remaining.

The extraordinary nature of the contract - the biggest in the history of football - led in part to the woeful state of Barca’s finances by the time Messi left, and contributed to club debts of more than a billion euros.

In his final four seasons, Messi helped Barca win two La Liga titles and two Copa del Rey, but no further Champions Leagues.

One imagines Real Madrid will not only hope but expect to win the Champions League with Mbappé in their team, and much else besides.