PSG announce Messi signing: how much will he earn at new club?
Following his departure from Barcelona, Lionel Messi has signed an initial two-year deal at Ligue 1 club Paris Saint-Germain.
Argentina star Lionel Messi has been officially announced as a Paris Saint-Germain player, the Ligue 1 club revealing on social media and on their website that the former Barcelona captain has completed a free transfer to the Parc des Princes and has signed a two-year deal. Messi’s contract also includes the option to extend his stay in the French capital for a third year.
Messi to be presented as PSG player on Wednesday
Before explicitly confirming the 34-year-old's signing on Tuesday, PSG had teased the transfer in a series of social-media posts, which included a picture of an Argentinian flag hanging alongside shirts bearing the names and numbers of Neymar and Kylian Mbappé, Messi’s new strike partners in Paris.
The forward is set to be unveiled by PSG on Wednesday at 11am CEST (5am EDT).
Messi joins PSG following Thursday's announcement that he would not be signing a new contract at Barça. Despite the player accepting a 50% wage cut at the cash-strapped club and, in his words, doing "everything I could" to agree a salary the Blaugrana could afford, Barça said in a statement that they were unable to fulfil his new deal without falling foul of LaLiga’s financial-fair-play rules.
Messi’s departure from the Camp Nou brought an end to a 21-year association with Barcelona, where he scored 672 goals in 778 appearances, and won a total of 35 trophies.
How much will Messi earn at PSG?
Although PSG themselves did not offer details of his pay packet in their announcement of Messi’s arrival at the club, well-connected media outlets in France have provided an indication of how much the player seems likely to pick up per year in Paris.
On Tuesday, the sports daily L'Équipe revealed that Messi is set to earn 40 million euros gross at PSG, a figure that is similar to that quoted by the newspaper Le Parisien, which in a report at the weekend anticipated an annual amount of around 35 million to 40 million euros.
A 40-million-euro pre-tax salary, which obviously can also be expected to feature performance-based bonuses, would be five million euros more than the reduced, 35-million-euro pay deal Messi had agreed with Barcelona before his new Camp Nou agreement fell through.
However, it would be considerably less than the amount Messi earned as part of his most recent contract at Barça, which expired at the end of June. That deal, signed in 2017, gave him a basic wage estimated at 71 million euros gross - with bonuses potentially almost doubling that amount. According to contract details leaked by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in January this year, Messi’s total Barcelona salary, including add-ons, went as high as 138 million euros per season.
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Messi joins Neymar in top PSG wage bracket
Messi’s expected PSG salary puts him in the highest pay bracket in the squad alongside Neymar. The Brazilian, who played alongside Messi at Barça between 2013 and 2017, reportedly earns around 36 million euros gross per year - some way ahead of the Parisians’ third-best paid player, Mbappé, who pockets an annual wage thought to be in the region of 25 million euros.
Messi’s former LaLiga rival Sergio Ramos, who left Real Madrid for PSG on a free transfer in July, is reported to be on a yearly after-tax salary of 21 million euros in Paris.