Byolante posted:

For 100m even in today's market you should be expecting to get a player who can literally carry a team to victory on their own. Bale did it at Spurs and Ronaldo does it at Real and Portugal. Neymar is a hilarious bust and the ensuing idiocy involving taxes and hidden fees only makes it that much more embarassing.

blue footed boobie posted:

Haha what the hell? I think Barca expected him to do more than pop up in a couple of games every season for their €117m

Ninpo posted:

Neymar is going to be a flop and anyone who thinks otherwise is a delusional Barca plastic. It was a bad business move, move on. Consider Neymar your equivalent of United buying Veron.

Ninpo posted:

Neymar is going to be a flop and anyone who thinks otherwise is a delusional Barca plastic. It was a bad business move, move on. Consider Neymar your equivalent of United buying Veron, so just hope one of Real or Atletico buy him for most of your initial fee.

Voluspa posted:

And if that wasn't sufficiently revolting:

Ninpo posted:

Does that last one say "Meanwhile, in England"?

If so I love it.

Rycalawre posted:

He's a Spurs fan. He controls the entire media...

Voluspa posted:

BWV posted:

I know its fun to make fun of expensive players but i dont see how him costing any amount of money is bad for the club. Barcelona like Madrid have unlimited war chests. If the club cant afford it a Spanish bank will help them, and if that bank fails some dude from Qatar will come do it. Besides, half of Neymar's appeal is that he's such a star in South America and other countries. And unlike that Welshmen his profile will grow significantly at the world cup.

Pedro De Heredia posted:

It's bad for the club because they engaged in all sorts of shifty behavior and potentially even broke the law. That goes without saying. Barcelona don't have an unlimited war chest. If they had an unlimited war chest, they would have done this transfer the normal way, by paying regular transfer fees and having those divided among N&N, DIS, and Santos. They didn't. Instead, they ensured Neymar would sign for them by giving insane amounts of money to his father, through dubious contractual arrangements, without having to pay corresponding money to Santos or DIS. Now they have potential tax problems as well as problems with Santos. They've also had a president quit over this ordeal, and it has undoubtedly affected public perception of Neymar. It makes all the statements about how Neymar came to Barcelona for his love of the club and so forth look completely ridiculous when his father made like 50 million euros off of the sale. There are plenty of people in Barcelona who object to the notion that the club should just spend whatever, that's why there's rumbles of discontent regarding all those contract renewals / raises that Messi gets.

The Bale transfer is different, because, although it's also an insane and stupid amount of money, it's a really simple principle: the selling club wants x amount of money, Real Madrid pays x amount of money.

BWV posted:

I get that the fact it was done so secretively could anger Barca fans who want transparency. That makes a ton of sense to me. Is the general idea that if Rossell came out and said "we're spending over 100 million on Neymar" the club supporters would be mad? Would spending so much on a single player anger fans because it means the club is becoming ever more dependent on foreign cash and thus diluting the local/nationalist agenda the club is supposed to uphold?

quote:

Also, and I've asked this before, but why are third party ownership situations considered to be so much more unethical than regular transfers? At the end of the day you're still paying cash for the rights to sign a player. Why does it matter how many parties are involved?

Pedro De Heredia posted:

I don't know if supporters would have been mad if Barcelona spent 100 million on Neymar 'the normal way', the same way that Madrid spent 100 million on Bale. The last few years have really fed into this romantic idea of the club, where coaches and players are FC Barcelona born-and-bred, where you're regularly boasting about the amount of canteranos playing in a single game, and buying Neymar for 100 million euros 'the normal way' would have seemed like the antithesis of this.

But the problem is, they didn't pay 'the normal way.' They paid in a different way, presumably so that Neymar's father would get a larger share of the total amount Barcelona were willing to pay. The anger doesn't come from the club hiding things; it comes from the fact that the things they hid are unethical.


Because the third party is usually only interested in making a profit. In a regular situation, a club has an asset (the player) which they can either play (as the whole point of a club is to have a team playing football), or sell for a transfer fee which can then be reinvested on other players who will play (or in the general running of the club). A third party is just interested in making a profit off of a future sale, and so the most common stereotype associated to third-party ownership is 'great player makes a weird transfer almost wholly unrelated to sport.'

It's just understood that a club can charge whatever they want, and that's the price of doing business. But here it wasn't Santos charging a ludicrous amount, it was Neymar's father. Neymar's father has made more from this deal than most Barcelona make in their entire time there. And for what? for being Neymar's father?

Now, I understand that for Neymar, it's probably preferable for his father to make all this money instead of Santos. That's completely understandable. But it looks like they engineered him making the money instead of Santos in really dubious ways. That's not really that cool.

quote:

Brazilian agent Wagner Ribeiro has claimed Neymar is “the cheapest player that Barcelona have ever signed” as a result of his low salary -- despite suggesting the player had personally received the controversial 40 million euro “penalty clause.”

Ribeiro represented Neymar earlier in his career and was involved in an attempt to push through a move to Chelsea as far back as summer 2010. Until now, the FIFA agent had not been prominently connected with the deal that took the player from Santos to Barca, but he dined with Neymar Sr. and club president Josep Maria Bartomeu on Monday night and has now spoken about the financial details of the transfer.


“Neymar is the cheapest player that Barcelona have ever signed,” he told Spanish news agency EFE. “He cost 17.1 million euros [from Santos] and was on the radar of all the great clubs. He was cheaper than all the players who came up from the youth system.”

Ribeiro said that, in his view, the transfer had been very cleverly put together, although his explanation for the various components of the deal -- which remains the subject of a legal investigation in a Spanish court amid claims of “simulated contracts” -- appears to differ from the official explanation issued by the club.

Ribeiro continued: “I will explain -- the 40 million added to the 54 million over five years [in wages] makes a total of 94 million. That represents 18.8 a year. Taking away taxes of 56 percent on the net figure, 8.27 million is left a year, which is a much lower salary than he would earn at other clubs, which offered 12 million net.

“For me, Neymar could have signed for another club earning much more than he gets now, but he wanted Barcelona and that is how the operation was fixed, although it financially damaged the kid. This is the best structured operation in which I have participated in my professional life.”

Barca have said that the 17.1 million euro payment to Santos represented the transfer fee and that an additional 40 million paid to N&N -- a company owned by Neymar Sr. -- was a “penalty clause.” The club announced that additional side deals -- for services such as scouting, marketing and development work signed with both Santos and N&N -- took the total to 86.2 million euros.

The explanation offered by Barca added: “The total salary cost to the club is 56.7 million euros [gross], which is divided into three concepts: 2.7 million euros as agent commission [five percent, rather than the 10 or 15 percent paid by other clubs], a 10 million euro signing-on fee and a guaranteed salary of 44 million euros.”

However, Ribeiro’s claim that Neymar Jr. will effectively be paid 18.8 million euros a year for five years appears to contradict Barca’s position that the 40 million euro payment is not due to the player but rather a business-to-business “penalty” incurred because the Brazil international moved to the Camp Nou a year earlier than had been agreed.

Barca’s hopes of reclaiming the extra 13.6 million euros that they have paid to the tax authorities are dependent on establishing that the 40 million payment was not a means of augmenting payments to Neymar.

BWV posted:

a key aspect of Barcelona's appeal is their own mythologizing/history/propaganda as club that is greater than a business

Lladre posted:

It quite simply is. A bunch of sandy cunts on an internet forum may not think so. Who cares.

Lladre posted:

It quite simply is. A bunch of sandy cunts on an internet forum may not think so. Who cares.

Byolante posted:

When I think of paragons of the beautiful game I think of a pack of tax dodging criminals who sold out to a slave state to win the world cup bid for them.

Lladre posted:

It quite simply is. A bunch of sandy cunts on an internet forum may not think so. Who cares.

Suqit posted:

It would be pretty cool if you made any posts in here that weren't about your weird hate for Barcelona.

Byolante posted:

I posted about Osasuna beating Atletico

Suqit posted:

Unfortunately that one post is overwhelmingly drowned out by your ridiculous over the top hatred of Barcelona.

Byolante posted:

I am hardly the only person in here berating Barcelona. Would you prefer it to be a whole lot of barca plastics seeing who can fit mes que un dick furthest down their throat?

Chas McGill posted:

Suqit who should replace Tata after this season? Is Rafinha a good player? Luis Enrique looks good in a suit, but he isn't as handsome as Michael Laudrup.

Drogadon posted:

My role in this thread is to talk about Keylor Navas

http://www.ligabbva.com/2544_liga-bbva/2430810_keylor-navas-es-el-mejor-portero-de-la-liga-bbva.html

Byolante posted:

I am hardly the only person in here berating Barcelona. Would you prefer it to be a whole lot of barca plastics seeing who can fit mes que un dick furthest down their throat?

Suqit posted:

No but I think it would be pretty cool if instead of everyone tripping over themselves to prove that they hate Barcelona

Ho Chi Meeeeee posted:

Are you going to support Barcelona when the morons at the Catalan independence movement get their wish and Barcelona has to play Espanyol every week because no one wants to join the Catalan league?

Voluspa posted:

I'm sorry, did you miss the part where that is the entire sports dialogue in the country? polarization of football as a whole. I'd understand if non-spanish supporters who've never been to the country, have a hard time grasping the cultural duopoly plaguing the current football conversation.

Suqit posted:

cares nothing about Spanish soccer