Cristiano Ronaldo Juventus Shirt Sales Are Incredible But Won't Repay His €100m Transfer Fee

Juventus are already feeling the impact of having Cristiano Ronaldo at their club, with various reports peddling the claim that around 520,000 shirts with his name were sold in a single 24 hour period following the completion of the transfer.

Juve's social media following also received a huge boost and certainly a lot more people around the world are suddenly talking about the Old Lady.

But when shirt sales figures are quoted what usually comes next is the inaccurate claim of how much of their transfer fee they have already repaid through those sales alone.

A headline on this story from The Sun, for example, read, 'Juventus sell HALF A MILLION shirts to pay off half of Cristiano Ronaldo's £99million fee'.

That is based on the flawed logic that the price of an individual shirt multiplied by 520,000 will put around £48m in Juventus' pocket for that day of sales alone.

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Juve will still make some cash off selling shirts but certainly not anything like enough to even come close to paying off the transfer fee through sales alone.

That is because the vast majority of shirt revenue goes to the suppliers - Nike, adidas, Puma, etc - who have already paid vast sums for what is essentially a licensing deal to manufacture and sell official merchandise, while the clubs will only see an additional windfall of up to 15 per cent.

This is explained in a wider 2016 mythbusting piece by Jake Cohen for The Set Pieces.

"adidas, Nike, Puma, and other kit suppliers get 85-90% of shirt sale revenue and this is the industry standard," Cohen wrote.

He used the example of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who triggered similar shirt sales headlines when he joined Manchester United in 2016, to detail how clubs take just a small cut of royalties from shirt sales, estimating that 300,000 Ibrahimovic shirts might have only pocketed United an extra £3m.

Cohen finished his explanation with this concise concluding sentence: "Put simply, there's a reason why adidas has earned more in the last six months than Manchester United, one of the highest-earning football clubs in the world, has earned in its 138-year existence."