9. Luis Figo (Net profit: £32.8m)
It takes an act of astonishing betrayal to prompt a Spaniard to smuggle a pig’s head into a football stadium and throw it at you. But that’s exactly what mercurial Portuguese playmaker Figo managed, after joining Real Madrid from Barcelona for a whopping £37m in 2000. The forward was one of the most gifted players on the planet at the time and it will have been little consolation for Barca that they earned a £32m profit from their arch rivals, having bought Figo for a mere £4.2m from Sporting Lisbon five years earlier.