Making Sense Of The Parisians' Splurge

The astronomical transfer fee paid for Neymar, which is in a realm beyond our comprehension, might soon REPRESENT AN ASTUTE PIECE OF BUSINESS, as the transfer market spending spirals out of control.

- Ayon Sengupta

There is a world of excesses,and the gulf between that and reality, where most of us are involved in the pursuit of making ends meet, seems to only broaden with each passing day.

When Sportstar wrote about the €100m signing of Irish forward Gareth Bale in 2013, we had compared it to other unnecessary expenses elsewhere in the world, coming as it did at a time when the United States and most European nations were going through a terrible economic slump. Four years on, football, which gives us solace and makes us forget the dreary drag of daily life, seems to announce even more vehemently that the game and its stars are not attuned to the struggles of the masses, the very masses that help make them.

THE TRANSFER SPENDING of the European clubs increases year on year, and the efforts of the world and also the European governing body to rein in the madness have met with little success. Clubs in Spain, England, Italy and Germany have already forked up €2.5 billion during the 2017 summer transfer window, with almost a month-long trading space still open. The four leagues had an overall outlay of around €2.2 billion in 2014, a year after the Bale sale.