Report Reveals FC Barcelona Star Lionel Messi’s Record-Breaking Contract

Lionel Messi’s four-year contract with FC Barcelona is price €555.2 million ($673.8m), based on a report.

A leaked copy of what’s reportedly the contract Messi signed in November 2017 was published by Spanish newspaper El Mundo on Sunday.

If the main points are appropriate, it’s the most costly contract ever paid to a soccer participant.

It exhibits the 33-year-old, thought-about by many to be the best soccer participant in historical past, earns as much as $168.5 million a season. Underneath Spanish regulation, he would reportedly have to pay around half that amount in taxes.

The contract expires on June 30, when the Argentine ahead may depart the membership he joined aged 13 on a free switch. Messi rocked the soccer world when he handed in a switch request in August and it stays unclear whether or not he’ll signal a brand new cope with Barcelona.

The revelation comes because the membership battles to include a €1.17 billion ($1.42b) debt. With €730 million ($885.9m) due within the quick time period, stories in Spain have advised the well-known membership, one of many world’s greatest, is on the brink of bankruptcy. Barcelona’s wage invoice accounts for 74 per cent of its general revenue.

In a press release, reported by BBC Sport, the membership denied it was behind the leak of Messi’s contract.

“FC Barcelona categorically denies any accountability for the publication of this doc, and can take applicable authorized motion in opposition to the newspaper El Mundo, for any harm which may be induced because of this publication.

“FC Barcelona expresses its absolute help for Lionel Messi, particularly within the face of any try and discredit his picture, and to wreck his relationship with the entity the place he has labored to change into the perfect participant on this planet and in soccer historical past.”

Messi, who’s Barcelona’s file goalscorer, had requested to go away the membership after falling out with former membership president Josep Maria Bartomeu. In an interview in September, Messi mentioned he “wanted to leave” and described the membership’s administration underneath Bartomeu as a “catastrophe”.

Within the interview, with Goal, Messi mentioned Bartomeu had reneged on a promise to permit him to go away on a free switch on the finish of 2019/20.

“I believed and was positive that I used to be free to go away, the president at all times mentioned that on the finish of the season I may determine if I stayed or not,” he mentioned.

“Now they cling to the truth that I didn’t say it earlier than June 10, when it seems that on June 10 we had been competing for La Liga in the course of this terrible coronavirus and this illness altered all of the season.

“And that is the explanation why I’m going to proceed within the membership. Now I’m going to proceed within the membership as a result of the president informed me that the one technique to depart was to pay the €700 million ($823m) clause, and that that is inconceivable.”

With Bartomeu’s resignation, Barcelona – considered one of 4 member-owned golf equipment in La Liga – will elect a brand new president on March 7. The three candidates are former Barcelona president Joan Laporta, businessman Victor Font and former membership board member Toni Freixa.

All three candidates have beforehand expressed their want for Messi to stay on the membership ought to they be elected.