Record sums a world apart in global recession

THE normal rules don’t apply in football. The global economy may be mired in the worst recession in living memory, but transfer records can still be smashed.

The €94 million that Real Madrid will pay for Ronaldo comes a week after the Spanish club paid €65m to AC Milan for Kaka. Yet Real is already carrying €500m in debt. And it’s not as if the Spanish economy is the powerhouse of Europe. They’ve got the highest unemployment rate in the EU and are suffering a housing market collapse compar-able with our own.

On the same day that Real announced that they would pay Ronaldo €117m over six years, the National Statistics Institute in Spain published the worst deflationary figures in 57 years, while economists said that wage inflation in the country was approaching zero. Not in the Bernabeu it’s not.