When Xherdan Shaqiri moved to Chicago Fire in 2022, he was the highest-paid player in the MLS for a while. In the soccer talk Heimspiel, Shaq talks about the differences in the USA and Europe when it comes to money.
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- Xherdan Shaqiri moved from Chicago Fire to FC Basel in the summer, giving up a lot of money in the process.
- In the soccer talk Heimspiel, Shaqiri explains what it was like to be the top earner in the MLS.
With an annual salary of 8.2 million dollars (7.1 million Swiss francs), Xherdan Shaqiri was one of the top earners in the MLS. Asked about the high salary in the football talk show Heimspiel, Shaqiri smiles: "It's always nice, no matter where you work." And he teases presenter Stefan Eggli: "I don't think you'd be at blue Sport if you had a better contract somewhere else."
In the USA, the salaries of sports stars are published. For Shaqiri, who was by far the best-paid professional at Chicago Fire, this was not a problem, on the contrary. "I didn't see any envy. When I was in the dressing room, I had the feeling that people think it's cool when someone earns that much," he explains.
That's not the case everywhere. "It's different in Europe. When someone knows what someone else earns, they think to themselves: Why does he earn more? What can he do better than me?" says Shaqiri.
Renounced a lot of money with FCB return
However, money alone was not his incentive for the move to North America. "I've known Georg Heitz (editor's note: outgoing sporting director at Chicago Fire) from Basel for a long time, that's how the contact came about. And I really wanted to leave Lyon," explains the 33-year-old. "I moved to Chicago with ambitions, I wanted to be successful. Of course I had a highly paid contract, but I had also worked for it."
In the summer, an agreement was reached to release this "very good contract", as Shaqiri says, although it would have run until the end of the year. In doing so, he gave up a lot of money. In Basel, he earns "only" just under a fifth of what he was paid in Chicago. However, the 125-time international is certainly not starving. According to media reports, Shaqiri's annual salary at FCB is between 1.2 and 1.7 million francs.
