Ronaldo vs. Messi: Who signed the first professional contract for a higher amount?

At the time Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi started football, clubs were not yet paying such huge sums for transfers and wages. From today’s point of view, it may seem ridiculous the contracts they signed, but even then they were already very interesting sums. Not to mention the end of their careers.

For the first time in many years we will not see Ronaldo or Messi in the Champions League, which kicked off this Tuesday. The Portuguese striker and top scorer in the competition’s history will at least make up for it in the AFC Champions League, where his team Al Nassr played on the same day as the European competition of the same name kicked off.

Both legendary footballers are already making fans on other continents happy, but let’s recall a time when very few people knew them.

Messi took a salary of £6,000 a year during his young years in La Masia before signing his first professional contract with Barcelona for £2.6 million.

It was Ronaldo’s first professional contract with Sporting that cost the Portuguese club £860,000 a year, with a major change only coming in 2003 when one of the best strikers of all time earned a £1.82 million a year contract with Manchester United.

Currently, however, the two are on different footing, which might not be the case if the Argentine magician follows in the footsteps of his greatest former rival. Ronaldo earns £86 million a year at Al Nassr, while Messi earns just £43 million at Inter Miami.

But if we include all the other marketing activities, etc., we get to around 200 million in the case of Ronaldo, for example.

Very similar then for Karim Benzema at Al Ittihad, Neymar at Al Hilal or N’Golo Kante at Al Ittihad. The only exceptionally well-paid player in Europe who can match the aforementioned players is Kylian Mbappé.

Source: Sportskeeda, BBC