Memphis Depay’s transfer fees, and why his salary is not on this page

A transfer fee is a payment between two businesses. Both have reasons to make it public: the selling club wants its shareholders and supporters to see what it recovered, and the buying club wants the signing to look significant. A club listed on a stock exchange has a further reason, because a material transaction may have to be disclosed. So fees are announced, and the announcement is the document.

A wage is a payment to an employee, and no European league requires the employer to publish it. Salary figures that circulate come from agents, from leaks, or from estimate sites that model them out of squad-cost totals. Those totals are real: clubs publish aggregate wage bills in their accounts, but dividing a wage bill among players is modelling, not reporting.

That is why this page leads with a fee rather than a salary. Wage estimates for this player exist in quantity; not one of them can be traced to a document, and this site does not print figures of that kind.

It says what was announced, by whom, and when. It notes where a figure was described as conditional, because a fee "rising to" a number is not the same as a fee of that number. And it stops there, because the next step (from fees and unpublished wages to a total net worth) requires guessing at tax across several countries, at agent shares, at endorsement income and at spending.

That step is where the aggregator figures come from, and it is why they disagree with each other so widely. The methodology page sets out the test a figure has to pass to appear here.