Messi's £160k/week is really high for a player and probably reserved for the highest paid players in Euro soccer. Soccer is slightly different than most US sports in that teams buy and sell the rights to players instead of trading draft picks or whatnot.
I haven't looked at the exact numbers lately but in general, I'd say for the English premiership, teams will have around £500k-800k/week for the whole team in wages and even that is hard to sustain since there is a *huge* gap in the premiership. Rich teams like Man Utd and Chelsea probably have wages in the ~£1.7m/week range and they can sustain higher wages, of course, from gate receipts, ads, etc.
I don't know the numbers of Real Madrid but I think I read somewhere that they had revenue of something like 80M(?) more than Man Utd last year even in the rough economy. I wouldn't be surprised if they're pulling a loss each year though and getting cash infusions all the time. Transfer prices are flashy, yeah, but they may not be that big a deal if the player can be resold for a similar price later on. Obviously, Real Madrid over the last few years has been taking huge losses on bad buys but smaller clubs can make a lot of money developing youth talent to sell to the bigger clubs.
Edit: From above, Ronaldo does *not* get the £80M. Man Utd does. Ronaldo has to haggle with Real for a regular 6 year contract or whatever (probably in the £160-170k/week range).
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