With the highly anticipated release of EA Sports annual football game FIFA 20 released recently, we look at those ratings that have been released and look to see whether the highest paid players in real life, have the best stats in game.
It goes without saying that the two top rated players in the game would be Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, who are also the two top paid players. These two are clearly in a league of their own and their ratings of 94 and 93 respectively show this. 3rdplace, unsurprisingly, is also given to the 3rdtop paid player in Paris Saint Germain’s Brazilian talisman Neymar Jr. Neymar is seen as the closest player to Ronaldo and Messi in both earnings and ability and he will be hoping to bring himself out of their shadow in the next couple of years.
This is where our two lists break apart however and undervalued players, in terms of salary, are still highly rated due to their performances on the pitch. Following his big money move to Real Madrid in the summer, Eden Hazard has been given a bump in the ratings on the game but this has not seen him move into the top earners in world football. It could be argued that the next few players on the list may not be as well paid as the others due to their positions on the pitch, with attacking players always seen to be more valuable to clubs than those that do the dirty work. Players like Kevin De Bruyne, Virgil Van Dijk and Jan Oblak are all rated 90 + in the game, but do not appear in the top earners list. These players are undoubtedly great footballers, as reflected by their high overall ratings, but they may be undervalued by their clubs in terms of their salaries.
In fact, other than the top 3, the only other top 10 rated player on FIFA 20 that appears in our top 20 football earners is Liverpool winger Mohamed Salah who gets a 90 rating and a reported yearly salary of $25,100,000from the European champions. Our next top rated, and top paid players comes in the form of French wonderkid Kylian Mbappe. After bursting onto the scenes at Monaco and a couple of trophy laden years at Paris Saint Germain, the 20 year old is rewarded with a 89 rated card, which gets him joint 11thwith a couple of other high paid players in Sergio Ramos and Sergio Aguero. It remains to be seen whether some of these “lesser paid” players will look to force a pay rise following their high rating on the video game series. Stranger things have definitely happened!
Comments