LIONEL MESSI IS

Lionel Messi is one of only four athletes to ever earn over a billion dollars in their career while still active in their sport. His total career earnings sit at about $1.2 billion with almost a perfect fifty-fifty split between salary and endorsements. Now that's obviously a lot of money, but it's often hard to comprehend just how much money $1 billion is. With the World Cup being played in America this year, I thought it would be fun to express Messi's career earnings in some distinctly American terms. To kick things off with possibly the single most American consumer item that $1.2 billion could buy you just over 200 million Big Macs. It could also buy you 900 million cans of Budweiser, or just over 170 million hot dogs in a baseball stadium. For those of you doing the math at home, that means you could do the 999 challenge 16 million times. If all those hot dogs and beer make you sick, don't worry. You can afford 920,000 ambulance rides. If you want to stay healthier, you could buy 240 million Costco rotisserie chickens, the sacred staple of the American economy. Rounding out the list, you could assemble yourself a fleet of over 26,000 Ford F-150s. Or if you wanted to stay put, you could do so in one of your 3,000 median priced American homes. We'll have to wait and see if 200 million Big Macs is enough to win Argentina the World Cup.