Things just keep getting better for Cristiano Ronaldo (38 goals in all competitions so far this season) as reports are suggesting that Manchester United is preparing to offer him a new, improved contract taking him into the 9.3 Million Euro per season range.
Ronaldo had just recently re-upped his latest deal a few months ago, but this new deal would bump him up 4.7 Million Euro per year more. It’s thought that the new deal (150k+ Euro’s per week) is including Image Rights, something similar to what was believed to be in David Beckham’s contracts.
An interesting thing that caught my eye was in the “Clause” part of this reported new contract. Ronaldo’s alleged buyout price for clubs to come in to purchase in a cool 127 Million Euro, but more interesting is the NEW clause written in respect to the introduction of the Webster Ruling.
According to Article 17 of Fifa’s transfer regulations (Andy Webster), players who sign contracts when aged under 28 are able to unilaterally break those contracts after just three years and to prevent Ronaldo from doing this, Manchester United has included language stipulating that he would have to pay a very big, yet un-named sum personally to buy out the remaining time on the contract.
I bet we see many more of these NEW clauses with young players as clubs are starting to protect themselves from losing out on their investments and protecting themselves from clubs that are possibly looking to poach young players from clubs rather than paying Millions of Euros.
Example—
Imagine if Chelsea hadn’t have had to pay the 34.4 Million Euro for Michael Essien that they paid to Ligue 1 Olympique Lyon in August of 2005. All Essien would have had to do with the new Webster Ruling would have been to notify Lyon that he was leaving and exercising his right under Article 17 after three years under contract and then buy out the remaining contract terms with his own money.
If that had happened, I would imagine that Chelsea would gladly repay the player the money he paid to buy out his contract in a “signing bonus” (something he was going to get anyways and just added to the top) and then sign him to even better improved weekly wages, which would make sense because at the end of the day Chelsea would be saving tens of Millions of Euros and could focus that money on purchasing other players.
