The price of money

As you know I try desperately to not talk about my favorite soccer team, Barcelona FC, here in this space. The tiny number of readers who share my fervent soccer interest already more or less know what I have to say, and the rest of you are not interested. However, I hope you can tolerate a bit of news when it's particularly big and has moral, state of the world implications.

It will not remotely be news to any soccer fans here, but it will be out of the blue for pretty much anyone else: Barcelona FC just bought a player from the Liverpool team for the second highest amount of money for a soccer transfer ever! We paid roughly 140 plus million euros for Philippe Coutinho.

Philippe Coutinho is a very good soccer player. Is he the best soccer player there is? No, that player, Messi, already plays on Barcelona. So is Coutinho the second best soccer player in the world? Oh, no, no. Let's say he's about the 25th best soccer player in the world, which is very, very good.

So let's take a real look at this: Someone paid something like 180 million dollars just for the 25th best soccer player in the world to come play for their team instead of another team. Is that kind of sick?

Well, while I am truly delighted to have this young Brazilian man come play for my team, yes, I have to admit, 180 million dollars just for this is a little sick when you look at the state of the world and people and the ugliness and all those things. It is a bewildering amount of money, and difficult to grasp, so I went and looked at just what a person can get with 180 million dollars. And what I found out put this soccer sale into a horrifying perspective.

Do you know what you can get for 180 million dollars?



No. 6 (Violet, Green, and Red) by Mark Rothko.