Athletico Bilbao keeper Kepa Arrizabalaga (who???!?) has paid his OWN release fee of £71M to La Liga prior to joining Chelski. Madness.
Fck me, I know footballers are well remunerated these days, but that's still a staggering amount of money to have lying around.
It's not that he randomly decided to bail and pay for it by himself. The purchasing club has paid him a big sum. He then paid the club. That way the purchasing club/player pay the taxes on it and the club gets the full amount. That's just how it works in Spain.
The ridiculous thing is an unknown is costing £70m.... yet Madrid want to pay £32m for Courtois Well its all ridiculous frankly
Thats just a quirk of the Spanish transfer rules. The player has to physically pay the release fee to the Spanish FA. Reality is that Chelsea will have given him the money to pay it...
Aaah. The Beeb on twitter didn't make that clear. Still a ridiculous sum for a relative unknown with 1 cap.
He’s only unknown as he plays in Spain and courtois plays here. The lad nearly joined Real Madrid in January apparently
Ok, i'll rephrase,... a kid moving for £70m... when probably the best goalkeeper in the world is expecting to move for less than half that. But aside from that..... the obscenity of the transfer fee. £70m. To slosh around waiting for another player or agents pocket. You could buy several streets in Barnsley for that. You could fund buildings. Start business. Redevlop communities. Teach and educate thousands upon thousands. And it's going to a club for practically a child who stands in between two sticks and dives about a few times each 90 minute period once or twice a week. Just insane.
I don't understand why works of art sell for hundreds of millions of pounds. It's just somebody splashing a bit of paint around. Etc.
So you think a transfer fee of £70m for a young kid to stand in goal is a good thing? To be fair.... if a personal collector of hugely priced art, the two are inflated by the same traits.... hubris, ego and vanity.
It's no worse than spending that amount of money on a painting, or on producing a film. I wouldn't pay Lewis Hamilton, for instance, in washers, because I find what he does deeply uninteresting. All the research into making his car faster, the construction of racetracks, the money put into safety, his wages, whatever else. It costs millions, but I can think of nothing more dull. Except perhaps golf. Someone thinks he is worth it, though, and so they pay it. That's it. Embrace it if it's your bag. Don't if it isn't. The number of people willing to subsidise it is there, the interest is there, and so the market sets the fees.
It really can't last much longer, the world is running out of rich people throwing their money away. A big down turn, TV fees finally drying up and I can't imagine whats going to happen. Buying some young kid for £70m, means that for a decent keeper, if we tried to replace Davies might suddenly be worth £5m. And teams in league 1 expecting fees of £1m plus and so it goes on and on. Fans complain as they are asked to pay more, businesses asked to pay more in sponsorships... Somewhere along the way we got it dreadfully wrong. As you say, giving a young lad millions to whizz round a driving track a few weeks a year and travel the world, i'm not an art fan, but I can understand the concept of something rare and scarce escalating in value, the same for a vintage car, or an ancient period property. Consider the price inflation in football. A week or so ago the idea of house price inflation being ridiculous, if it were possible... I wonder what football transfer fee inflation has been the last decade or so?
I am just looking now as regards transfer inflation. In 2009, Kaka went to Real for £56million. So in the intervening eight years (09-17) it basically quadrupled when Neymar left for PSG. Zidane was the record at £46million (2001) until the Kaka deal. I am looking at this: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.rte.ie/amp/894931/
I think an interesting comparison would be in each league for say a keeper, defender, midfielder and striker to show the knock on effect into the lower leagues. Also if you think of the Galactico phase, Real were signing huge names. If you look now, also rans that often get sold on after a season are going at high fees. And what inflation from Shearers record move to Blackburn, what 25 years ago.
