Money

Lionel Messi has recently unveiled his plans to personally and painstakingly design, build and operate his own theme park in Nanjing, China. It will be called the Messi Experience Park (MEP), which is infinitely lamer than Messi World, Magic Messi Kingdom or Messi's Wonderous Adventureland. With over 20 attractions on a sprawling 42,000 square meter space, the biggest question remains whether or not Mateo Messi will be old enough or tall enough to have any fun.

With the 2016-17 Premier League season in the books, we wanted to take a deep dive into how each team performed based on its payroll.

The final table reflected the spending gap between the top six teams and the rest. In fact, the eight teams that spent over $100 million in wages this season all finished in the top 8 of the table.

Although that might seem entirely too predictable, there was significant performance variance among those teams. Also, ninth place Bournemouth had one of the lowest payrolls, suggesting that they found some good players at a discount.

Andrea Pirlo was left out of the NYCFC lineup for the third straight week despite receiving a salary ($5.915 million) that’s greater than his entire club’s actual salary cap ($3.85m).