What would you buy with Cristiano Ronaldo?

Manchester United has accepted a world record £80 million from Real Madrid for striker Cristiano Ronaldo.

With critics questioning whether he is worth the money, and indeed whether football spending is getting out control, we look at what else you could get for a cool £80 million.

81,000,000 hamburgers

Prefer a good meal to a diving Iberian? With £80 million, you could buy enough 99p hamburgers to fill over 20 million Olympic sized swimming pools. That adds up to a whopping 40 million calories, enough to feed 300 people for an entire lifetime – that’s if they could survive on a diet of a kilo of fat a day!

750 flights in space

If the thought of £80 million makes you see stars, you might want to consider a flight into space with Virgin Galactic, the world’s first spaceline. Tickets start at £107,000 but this is something of a bargain when you consider that the first space tourist paid around £10 million. You’ll have to be patient though, the flights aren’t yet in operation.

1 luxury yacht

That’s right, £80 million would buy you just 1 luxury yatch: the Pelorus. But it’s worth the money. The Pelorus can boast at being one of the largest and most luxurious private yachts in the world. Measuring 377 feet, you could invite 75 of your closest and most envious friends to lay head to toe along the length.

460 Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes

Fancy yourself as a bit of a James Bond type? With £80 million you could buy 460 Aston Martin Vanquish cars, as driven in Die Another Day. There will be no fear of scratches or prangs during your 007-inspired stunts, you can simply nip home and pick up another. Just remember to buy a garage big enough to keep them in.

520 houses

With £80 million, you could provide a boost to the UK’s ailing property market all by yourself. Property prices have been falling since the credit crunch, so the average house price in England and Wales is current less than £153,000. Of course, you could buy 80 luxury pads for £1 million each, but then where would you keep all your new cars?

100,000 pairs of designer shoes

More Carrie Bradshaw than Craig Bellamy? £80 million would buy you 100,000 pairs of Manolo Blahnik Caymino Jeweled Slingback Sandals. Just imagine: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda multiplied by 27,000 all tottering gracefully through Manhattan in £800 sandals.

300,000 iPhone 3G S handsets

iPhone users up and down the country have been wailing and gnashing their teeth since O2 refused to subsidise their upgrades to the new iPhone 3G S. At £275 per handset, £80 million would be enough to put the smiles back on 300,000 disgruntled faces, allowing them to go back to flashing their handset in bars in the hope of inspiring widespread envy.

2,700 trained nurses

With a national shortage of trained NHS staff, £80 million would pay the wages of 2,700 nurses for a year. Or cover the salary for 50 nurses for their entire working lives. Alternatively, it would pay for 80 full-body MRI scanners or cover the strain smoking puts on the NHS for 160 years.

22 tropical islands

With tropical islands starting at just over £3.5m, Real Madrid could put Ronaldo back on the shelf and buy the first 11 a couple of islands each. That should be enough to get any team motivated, but with quality ducks available for purchase at £8 per bird, you could also populate your pond with 80 million of your favourite feathered friends.

50,000 duck islands

You might think that islands built especially for ducks are the exclusive domain of expenses cheating MPs like Sir Peter Viggers. But with £80 million, you could be the envy of greedy MPs everywhere. Alternatively, you might just opt for 42,000,000 copies of The Sunday Telegraph, the newspaper whose sales figures are said to have jumped by 1,000,000 since breaking the expenses scandal.

Photo by Paulo Camera