Real Madrid are "paying monthly fee for top players to keep Twitter blue ticks"

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.

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.

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.

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.