Featured Image Credit: Alamy & Twitter
Topics: Real Madrid, Sergio Ramos, Karim Benzema, Vinicius Jr
Josh Lawless
Topics: Real Madrid, Sergio Ramos, Karim Benzema, Vinicius Jr
Real Madrid are paying a monthly fee so that their first-team stars still have their blue ticks on Twitter.
On Friday, a slew of celebrities and sports stars lost verification status on the platform after new owner Elon Musk made the controversial decision to change to a subscription based service called 'Twitter Blue'.
Legacy verified checkmarks were removed and anyone wanting to keep it had to pay $8-a-month. Cristiano Ronaldo, the most-followed athlete on the site with 108 million followers, had his blue tick revoked.
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Musk personally paid for the blue ticks of LeBron James, William Shatner and Stephen King but plenty of athletes fumed over the call.
Paris-Saint Germain defender Sergio Ramos, who spent the majority of his time at Real, publicly called out Musk for "forcing payments” in order to secure a blue tick.
A few days on and the approach changed slightly as it was then communicated that accounts with at least one million followers would be keeping their verification.
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Real, who are the most-followed club on Twitter and have 47.3 million people browsing their content, are paying $1,000-a-month (plus tax) for a gold checkmark.
Their English language Twitter account, which has 16.5 million followers, has a blue tick. But the club have also ensured that all their players also retain verification status.
It's set them back $50-a-month for each member of their first-team squad, so for all 23 you're looking at a cost of $1150 per month and $13,800.
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It should be noted that the vast majority of their squad, including the likes of Karim Benzema and Vinicius Jr, do have more than one million followers.
But a prime case in point is Alvaro Odriozola, who now has a blue tick on his profile but only has 343,000 followers. The same can be said for Jesus Vallejo, who has 260,000 following him.