National incomes, haircuts and spaghetti – Neymar transfer inspires wacky math

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Brazilian striker Neymar Jr will set a world record when he transfers from FC Barcelona to Paris Saint-German (PSG) with a buyout fee of 222 million euros (about 262 million US dollars).

The fee is more than twice the current transfer world record that was set when Paul Pogba moved from Juventus to Manchester United for 105 million euros last summer.

Out-earning fellow stars

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Neymar has been offered a basic pre-tax salary of 53 million US dollars per year, or 1,025,000 dollars per week, 146,428 dollars per day, and 6,101 dollars per hour.

The salary will see him become the world's best-paid player in the world, beating Carlos Tevez at Shanghai Shenhua and his current Barcelona team-mate Lionel Messi, who reportedly earn 813,000 dollars and 660,000 dollars per week respectively.

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Math craze

The record transfer fee has also prompted many to rack their brains to find equivalents to that amount of money.

His annual salary is 627 times the gross national income (GNI) per capita of Singapore, which had the highest GNI per capita in 2016, according to the World Bank. It is also 3,441 times the GNI per capita of China, which stood at 15,500 dollars in 2016.

If Neymar lived in Beijing, he would be able to buy 175 100-square-meter courtyards in the historic Dongcheng district, the house price of which stands at some 100,000 yuan per square meter, or 14,865 dollars per square meter.

According to the BBC, the money is equivalent to the GDP of any of six of the world's smallest nations – Tuvalu, Montserrat, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Palau, whose GDP output ranged from about 33 million to 258 million dollars in 2015.

Twitter user @pazapool said it would be worth becoming a Parisian barber when the extravagantly coiffed Neymar comes to town. According to his calculation of the value of Neymar per mg, over 119,000 US dollars' worth of footballer would be left in hair on the barber's floor after he has a trim.

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Another user, @aw21097, said Neymar's cost could buy a total of 396 million packs of spaghetti, which is enough to cover the whole city of Barcelona.

Twitter

@Bikashkarki5 went a little bit further, saying "The cost of human cloning is around £1.29m. Why spend £198m on 1 Neymar when you could clone 153 Neymars at that price?"