Kaká: Its the money and stuff.

By: Rob | July 21st, 2008

I’m going to open up a pub debate* to you all Offsiders. Kaká as you will know by now, is wanted by Chelsea, they apparently have a had a bit of £60m turned down (although the talk has been of £80m). While this seems like an insanely high price for any man, I would say at this price, he’s a valuable assest to someone like Chelsea – to the point where they could actually make money on him. Is this reason that Chelsea so want to land him?

Imagine for a second, that Chelsea’s £60m offer had been accepeted, and Kaká was now standing around Stamford Bridge holding up a Chelsea shirt with his name and number on it. I figure that these days a football shirt is about £40 new, in the shops, with a name and number on it. Which means that to make £60m, Chelsea would have to sell 1.5m shirts (if my maths is wrong, and it probably is, correct me in the comments).

It sounds like a big ask – 1.5m shirts. But over say, 4 seasons, considering that Chelsea have a new shirt as well this season so the masses would flock to get the Kaká one – and factoring in the ‘new’ markets of the east, and lets be honest, football seems to be growing a bit in the old USofA, I don’t think its a big ask to imagine that he would sell that many shirts.

That isn’t of course factoring in the other Kaká tat that the Chelsea shop would sell – Brazil flags, Kaká flags, Brazil shirts, I belong to Jesus on everything and so on. Plus the demand for tickets would shoot up – look at what happened when Milan signed Ronaldinho.

The counter argument of course, is that the people buying shirts with Lampard or Terry on would just buy Kaká ones instead, so they wouldn’t make as much money – but I think that Kaká is big enough to compensate for that.

In fact, he’s probably the most sellable player in the game at the moment – Beckham might be selling Sharpies but he’s way past his prime, C-Ron is too Divisive, and Ronaldinho’s stock has plunged in the last two years. Messi comes close, but he’s not yet the name that Kaká is. I mean, he was on the Time 100 list! He’s the reigning World Footballer of the Year too.

I don’t mean to suggest that Chelsea are buying him purely for financial reasons. He is a bloody fantastic footballer. He is an attacking midfielder though, and they currently have Deco, Micheal Ballack and Frank Lampard all on the books. Now Lamps might well be on his way out, but that still leaves three players if Ricky was signed to compete for what could be one position. Unless, Ballack drops back to replace Makélélé in DM but that isn’t where he’s best.

So while Kaká is obviously younger than any of those three, there is an argument that right now, they don’t really need him. So why else would they spend all that money on him? They must think he’s profitable. Which shows there is waaay too much money in football these days.

I need to lie down, all that thinking about money has given me a headache.

*The pub debate was with an accountant. And I have no idea about money. So I could be on the wrong side of the argument. But its interesting anyway.