If the rumored wage Griezmann will be getting is correct, its quite deceptive to only focus on the transfer fee and not include the signing on bonus and his wage. 15m net per year is like 28m gross per year. Over a 5 year contract, thats far more than the 100m transfer fee. He'll be a huge investment and will force Coutinho to play far from the goal in midfield, whether we like it or not. Time will tell whether that is a smart decision.
Its also worth pointing out that RM have hardly spent any money over the past 5 years when taken into account their sales. The amount of money they have for spending big in the coming years must be insane.
I still think it's a smart decision to buy Griezmann. Of course his wage will be high but we got rid of some pretty high salaries over the last year with Neymar, Iniesta, Masche, Arda,... all gone and some more of the deadweight probably offloaded in summer. Yes, we've signed Coutinho and Dembele while Messi, Roberto and Pique got new contracts but I don't think our wage situation is as bad anymore.
Don't know if those wage numbers are correct but I've seen similar reported on multiple sites so I'll use them.
https://www.sportskeeda.com/football/la-liga-2017-barcelona-player-salaries
https://sillyseason.com/salary/fc-barcelona-players-salaries-69077/
Neymar: £275,000/week
Iniesta: £165,000
Mascherano: £130,000
Mathieu: £90,000
Arda: £85,000
are all gone since 2017.
Contract renewals:
Messi: I've seen reports his weekly wages will be around £500k, so that's about £165k more
Rakitić: £55k more after contract renewal
Roberto: £50k more after contract renewal
Pique: £35k more after contract renewal
MATS: £30k more after contract renewal
New signings:
Coutinho: £200,000 - £240,000 (I've seen different numbers reported; we only paid half of his wages this season)
Dembele: £200,000 - £250,000 (I've seen different numbers reported)
Paulinho: £120,000
Semedo: £75,000
Deulofeu: £75,000 (only paid half of that this season)
Mina: £68,000 (only paid half of that this season)
With very simplified calculations (without including bonuses etc. because those are unknown to me) we could say that:
- Coutinho is getting Neymar's wage (though with less bonuses and whatever else we paid to Neymar and his dad)
- we will basically give Iniesta's wage to Messi
- Mascherano's salary were used for improvement in contracts for MATS/Pique, Roberto and Raki
- Mathieu and Arda leaving are almost covering for Paulinho and Semedo wages.
- Mina was only here for 6 months and his wages in that time were probably covered with both Rafinha and Deulofeu going on loan.
So the only new big cost for the club are Dembele's wages and we can cover for that next season selling players on high wages like Paco, Gomes and Vidal.
Arthur, Lenglet and whoever else we'll buy obviously won't play for free and Umtiti, Busquets and probably Alba (though I hope not for now) will get new contracts as well but with new sponsorship contracts (Nike, Rakuten) and approved budget around 900M€ I think we can afford to give Griezmann 15m net. Of course it would be ideal if we could just give him Suarez's wages (meaning selling him) but we know this won't happen, at least not next season.
Personally I'm not against paying top money to get worldclass players (and AG is no doubt among them) but we should lower wages of squad/bench players so I hope we'll be smart here when giving contracts to Arthur, Lenglet,... Let them first prove their worth and we can always improve their contracts in a year or two (when some of the higher paid players like Suarez and Rakitić willl also probably leave) if they'll succeed but if they'll fail we can sell them easier with lower wages.
