Poor old Lionel Messi. It’s not exactly going to plan on the pitch for him yet at PSG. And off it – well let’s say he’s not cracked the crypto game either.

In the summer he agreed to be paid part of his signing-on fee in his new club Paris Saint-Germain’s own fan token. With cryptocurrencies at the start of a record-breaking run, it looked like a sure-fire way for the world’s best footballer to make more millions.

But it hasn’t worked out that way, according to analysis from Cloudbet.com the world’s oldest crypto sportsbook.

Messi’s unexpected transfer from cash-strapped Barcelona was announced on 10th August. He signed up for free, in a move designed  to get his huge million-dollar weekly wage off Barca’s books. League bosses were penalising them for their abject failure to keep the club’s deficit within permitted parameters.

The vastly wealthy PSG were so delighted to land the world’s biggest football star that they paid him an interesting signing-on fee.

Part of his “welcome pack”, they said, would be paid in cash as normal, but in a first for football, part of the fee would be gifted to him in PSG fan tokens.

Messi could be forgiven for looking kindly on PSG’s offer. The club’s token had almost tripled in value from the start of August to a record on the day of the Messi announcement.

Traders at Cloudbet took a deeper dive into the deal to assess how the Argentinian maestro’s signing-on fee is looking now.

On 10th August, the PSG token was valued at $49.83.

Media speculation across the continent suggests Lionel Messi was gifted one million euros worth of tokens. On that day the Euro-USD exchange rate was 1.17. So let’s estimate that PSG’s wealthy Qatar owners gave him $1.17m worth of tokens.

Trading at $49.83, this means Messi would have received 23,480 PSG tokens.

So how much money has Lionel Messi made from this deal? Well, as of today things aren’t looking terribly good. The PSG token recently traded at…. $19.02

That defeat by Man City hasn’t helped PSG or it’s cryptocoin’s value.

If Messi had received what is speculated to be one million euros in fan tokens on 10th August, his estimated 23,480 tokens would now be worth… $453,436

Which means if he cashed it in now it would only be worth 40% of what it was worth on the day that he signed for PSG!

American football stars like Aaron Rogers might be in the news for all the wrong reasons right now, but they’ve made headlines for being early adopters of Bitcoin salaries. If Messi had embraced BTC he’d be a lot richer.

Back on 10th August 2021, BTC was trading around $45,600.

And now? It’s at $58,000, a +25% rise. That $1.17m signing-on gift would now be around $1,460,000 – more than a million dollars more than the fee is worth in PSG tokens.