New dimensions of insanity

Players being transfered from one team to another team is part of sports, as loyality to a team is no any longer part of the game. Normally I don't care who buys whom (sounds like slavery, doesn't it?), but the news of the last days made me a bit curious, because there were two things different to how they usually are. Firstly, the huge amount of money involved, and secondly, the player paid the buy-out clause himself.

Yes, I am talking about the Neymar transfer form Barcelona F.C. to Paris Saint-Germain. According to various news agencies, Barcelona forward Neymar has paid his €222 million (US$260 million) buy-out clause in full. That's a huge amount of money and because the number is just too big for me to imagine, I had to calculate it into a value I can picture.

The price of this nice 150 m2 4 bedroom villa with a big plot is 141.000 €. That means you could by 1.574 of these villas with this amount of money!

The price of an avarage new car like this one is around 20.000 €. With the amount Neymar paid himself free you could buy 11.100 of these cars!

A worker who has a more than avarage income of 2.000€ a month has to work 111.000 months, or 9.250 years to earn this money.

The money a person spents on food is less than 10€ a day. With this amount of money you could feed at least 22.2 million people!

Or even better, building a factory where 100 people can work costs less than a million Euro. With this amount of money you could build almost 250 factories and thus employ at least 25.000 people.

I don't say that Neymar has to build factories, employ or pay people, what I want to say is how insane it is that a single player, on top of this a player from Brazil, the 5th country in the world with the most unequal distributions of income, where the richest 1% of the population get 47.8% of the income, while the poorest 10% get only 12% of the income, where 8.5% of the population (16.2 million) lives on less than $45/month and of these 16.2 million living below the poverty line, 4.8 million survive on no income at all, where 26% of the population still lives below the poverty line, and where in Rio de Janeiro alone, about a fifth of its population of six million live in several hundred favelas, which are slums, is able to pay this amount of money.

And this insanity will lead humanity to a deep abyss ... so what can we, every single one of us do to change this?

I think we can do a lot... if all of us start to boycott events where this slavery of mammon happens, we can turn this around.