While you’re reading this piece, Lionel Messi is blowing 35 candles on his birthday cake, spending it on vacations with his family like always.It’s difficult to guess what is his biggest birthday wish, but we’re quite sure that his current club, Paris Saint-Germain, dream of his stay at Parc des Princes. For a long time.Albeit one of the best ever didn’t net more than 11 times and assisted 15 more in 34 appearances for the Saints, and although he was an integral part of that excruciating UCL exit at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium – Messi earned the Parisians an incredible €700 million.All of a sudden, Messi is coming at us, and there are only eight of us!The Saints previously enjoyed substantial financial ‘booms’ with Neymar and Kylian Mbappe, but the storm the tiny Argentine magician caused upon his arrival to the City of Lights is unprecedented in French football.To put things into perspective – in the first three hours of the sale of Messi’s ’30’ jersey, PSG earned 933,000 euros, and soon the official club store was moved to a twice bigger and much better location, in the famous Champs-Elysees avenue.Messi about everything: Real Madrid are not the best! Lewandowski did not deserve Ballon d’Or, Benzema didMarc Armstrong, PSG’s Chief Partnerships Officer, explains that the demand for jerseys has grown between 30 and 40 per cent and the only thing that has stopped the growth of sales is – production. “When you have a signing so big, you can think that the whole job will pay off by selling jerseys, but it is not so. It is not possible to produce many additional jerseys so quickly.##EDITORS_CHOICE##”Deviations from the previously established agreement with the supplier are minimal, so we still cannot meet the demand for Messi jerseys. No one can meet the requirements, we touched the ceiling. We have already sold probably more jerseys than any other club in the world, the revenues from the ‘Jordan’ brand are huge, but the demand increased significantly when Messi arrived, “claims Armstrong. Who cares about goalkeepers when you’ve got Lionel Messi wearing your shirtFor the first time in the club’s history, the club sold over a million jerseys, of which 60 per cent were Messi’s.Filthy rich: Out of the Top 20 highest earners, 18 are from PSGA significant increase in profits (about 13%) since Messi’s arrival at the club was also brought about by the renewal of sponsorship agreements.”The increase in that segment of club earnings is also significant. From contracts that were between three and five million a year, we’ve reached those between five and eight million,” says Armstrong.FRI: 21.45: (1.70) SHAMROCK (3.50) BOHEMIANS D. (5.00)Another important factor in earnings is social networks, on which the popularity of Parisians has drastically jumped with the arrival of the Argentine. For example, the number of followers on Instagram increased from 38,500,000 to the current 60,900,000.”On social networks, we get an average of 1,400,000 followers a week. We are the first club to get 10, then 20 million followers on Tik-Tok and Instagram,” Armstrong points out.Best in the world, but not in France: Messi omitted from the Ligue 1 team of the seasonOf course, there are also a lot of sold-out tickets for Parc des Princes…To sum up, maybe he didn’t meet expectations in games and goals in the maiden season, but we shouldn’t forget that Messi arrived in Paris after 20 years in Barcelona and needed some time to adapt to his new home.
