Osimhen at €150m: The African Footballer as Balance-Sheet Asset

Galatasaray put a €150m price tag on Victor Osimhen, with vice-president Abdullah Kavukcu telling La Gazzetta dello Sport that the Nigerian’s valuation had doubled from the €75m the club paid Napoli last summer (Businessday) 12. Underneath the transfer headline sits the more structurally interesting number: of Osimhen’s roughly €21m annual package, around €5m is booked as image rights, on top of a €15m net salary and a €1m loyalty bonus 3.

The obvious story is a striker’s market value soaring on the back of his goal output. Read the contract instead. When image rights become a standalone, material line — roughly a quarter of total pay — the footballer stops being only an employee and becomes a brand asset the club co-monetises. Osimhen is African football’s clearest example yet of image-rights-as-wage: a player whose off-pitch identity is priced, structured and paid for as explicitly as his goals.

The consequence runs both ways. For the player, a large image-rights share converts personal brand into contractual income and hands leverage to whoever controls those rights and their tax treatment. For the club, it turns a squad member into a balance-sheet asset whose value — the €150m — is quoted like a holding, not a fee 4. That is how modern football increasingly works, but Africa’s biggest export stars have rarely been structured this openly. The lesson for the next generation of African talent is that the contract, not just the transfer, is where authorship of your own image is won or lost. Sign the rights away cheaply and you finance someone else’s asset.