What Would It Take To Remove Tattoos From European Soccer?

It would take European football stars more than a decade to collectively remove their ink—not that that’s happening, please God don’t let that ever happen. They are some of the most tattooed athletes in the world and definitely rank amongst the best looking. That would just be cruel.

Our friends at WhatClinic.com, a site that allows people to search for the clinic that best fits their needs, found users searching for tattoo removal had risen by 55 percent since 2013. About 40 percent of those users were age 24-35, and 60 percent were women. They decided to run an experiment on Euro 2016 football stars, because most are heavily tattooed, to find just how much it would cost them to remove their ink individually and as a whole.

After gathering a ton of data on eight of the most tattooed players (Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Toby Alderweireld, Martin Skrtel, to name a few), they estimated the cost to be $43,989.71 collectively. The price tag doesn’t alarm us, these guys earn well into the millions, it’s the hours of pain we’re worried about. It would take the eight players a total of 61 hours under the laser because clients can not physically sit for much longer than 30 minutes/session—enduring the burn for that long is impressive. It’s also not uncommon for the skin to blister, swell, bleed or be irritated afterwards. Would this interfere with their training schedules? Probably.

In all realness, if these athletes decided collectively to remove their ink, the world would probably be out of good soccer television for a long time. We’re glad these stats are hypothetical, seven of the top eight tattooed players listed below are still in the Euro 2016 for round 16 (sorry, Zlatan). We’ll be watching that for the next few weeks.

Below, find the footballers ranked in order of tattoo removal expense. Also listed are the years, hours and sittings that would be required to remove their ink.