RM claim Becks sold upwards of a million shirts in his first 6 months, so yeah, really
OK, for the sake of the argument let´s say Neymar is as popular as Beckham back then and that the latter actually sold one mil. kits.
The Neymar transfer was completed in the beginning of june, so roughly two months ago. These two months are the time frame, which we are looking at for the kit sales of Neymar, so a third of the time of your example of Beckham.
The kit of Neymar costs 100 € in the official Barca shop, which is probably the place, where Barcelona keeps the most of the of the price for themselves. Let´s say, they keep 75 % of it (it is probably way less, but w/e). For them to generate 57 mil. € with his kit sales alone, they would have to sell 560k kits, which is comfortably more than Beckham did in his first two months and roughly half the amount of all kits Barcelona sold in the whole 2010/2011 season. Sounds believable, right?
Looking at it from a different perspective, it becomes even clearer, how laughably high this suppossed numbers are.
It was already said in this thread that Barcelona generated roughly 190 Mil € in the commercial field in 2011/2012.
The commercial field includes money from the following things:
- kit supplier and main sponsor (ca. 60 Mil €)
- other sponsorship deals
- every single commercial in any media (press, tv, radio, internet)
- kit sales
- merchandise sales (general clothing, boots, accessories, homeware, etc., etc., etc...)
All of that together generated them roughly three times as much as Neymar´s cost in a whole season. How in the world are kit sales of a single player supposed to cover a third of all that annual stuff in the sixth of the time???
It baffles me, how anyone believes something like that?
