Neymar earns more than the entire squad of last night’s opponents Atalanta put together. The Paris Saint-Germain forward, 28, is on a staggering £620,000 per week following his world-record transfer from Barcelona in 2017.
That sees him earn around £32.2million in a year. And incredibly, the whole Atalanta team put together earn just shy of that figure, recording a total earning of between £30m and £32m. Neymar is by far PSG’s top earner with his mammoth £620k weekly wages.
Kylian Mbappe is next on around £280,000 per week – or £14.5m a year – with Thiago Silva, whose contract is up at the end of the season, on £190,000 per week, which equates to just shy of £10m across the year. When Mauro Icardi’s wages are taken into consideration, PSG’s front three earn approximately £50m per year.
For proper context, Alejandro Gomez, Duvan Zapata and Luis Muriel are each on an annual wage of £1.5m, which works out as around £29,000 per week. This sums up to a modest £4.5m per year between them.
This highlights a huge financial imbalance between both teams. However, the game itself was evenly matched although the French champions later triumphed with two quickfire goals to break Atalanta’s hearts in the closing stages.
Atalanta thought they were going to continue their Champions League fairytale after leading for most of the night through Mario Pasalic’s opener. As the clocked approached 90 minutes, PSG struck back through Marquinhos before Choupo-Moting completed the turnaround three minutes later.
The fortunes of Paris Saint-Germain have been transformed since they were taken over by Qatar Sports Investment (QSI) in 2011.
Stars such as Zlatan Ibrahimovic, David Beckham, Thiago Silva, Neymar and Kylian Mbappe have been welcomed to Parc des Princes over the last eight years, transforming the fortunes of a club down on its luck a decade ago and within a whisker of being relegated to Ligue 2.
President Nasser Al-Khelaifi has been the public figurehead of the Parisian outfit for the duration of this time, overseeing the running of the club as a whole and seeking to modernise it to such an extent that it becomes a major player in European football.
